EUAN McCOLM: Sickening spectacle of an SNP politician using blood scandal ... trends now
It was a grotesque intervention, a shameless – and utterly tasteless – attempt to make political capital out of the deaths of thousands of people.
Reacting, on social media, to a news report on the infected blood scandal, Nationalist MP Amy Callaghan could not help trying to score points.
‘Another scandal at the hands of Westminster,’ she wrote. ‘Another in a very long list. So many lives lost and many more in tatters.
It’s only with independence we’ll be free of Westminster scandals for good.’
Ms Callaghan should be ashamed.
Nationalist MP Amy Callaghan said ‘only with independence’ would the we be free of Westminster scandals in the wake of Brian Longstaff’s report into infected blood products
To use victims – those whose lives were cut cruelly short, those living with serious illnesses such as HIV and hepatitis, and the families torn apart by loss – of one of the greatest health scandals of modern history as pawns in some tawdry game of constitutional one-upmanship was to belittle their experiences. It was beyond thoughtless of her to react as she did.
Destroyed
Ms Callaghan should stop virtue signalling and instead try, for a moment, to imagine the experiences of those whose lives have been destroyed by this scandal. Perhaps she could think of those parents who saw their children claimed by Aids before they reached their teens or the mothers who, after receiving blood during childbirth, were sentenced to premature death.
Just maybe, if Ms Callaghan can truly try to empathise with victims, she will see that their experiences deserved a damned sight more respect than she has shown.
I don’t hold out much hope. After all, if Ms Callaghan truly cared about the plight of those infected with contaminated blood, she would have spoken up when a Scottish probe into the scandal – the Penrose Inquiry, announced by Nicola Sturgeon in 2008 and published in 2015 – was dismissed by victims as a ‘total whitewash’.
What the SNP might characterise as a ‘uniquely Scottish solution’ turned out to be nothing of the sort. In fact, it is widely regarded as a sham, a betrayal of those who suffered and those who continue to do so.
The idea that the Scotland of some imagined past would have been free from scandal is the stuff of blood-and-soil nationalist fantasy. And it is of precisely no use to those affected by the NHS’s use of contaminated blood.
Nobody will accuse Sir Brian Langstaff’s report into the use of infected blood products in the NHS between 1970 and 1991 of whitewashing anything. The facts he outlined are horrifying, heartbreaking and frequently infuriating. He tells of lives needlessly destroyed by incompetence and attempts to cover up the scandal.
It is his conclusion that the infection of 30,000 people with HIV and hepatitis could, largely, have been avoided. So far, about 3,000 of those who were given contaminated blood have died. Many more will die prematurely.
A BBC investigation, published last month, gave a distressing insight into what could be expected in Sir Brian’s report. Leaked documents revealed secret medical trials of children with blood-clotting
