WHEN the police in Scotland are asking for clarification about the arrest policy for those daring to go to a drive-through Costa coffee, you know you’re in trouble.

The Stay at Home slogan has become a mantra, a script repeated hundreds of times a day, by the Scottish Government and their experts, but also by every second advert on TV. My local radio station even has its own Stay at Home jingle, just in case we’d forgotten it from the time we moved from our living room to the kitchen.

The message is simple, it is also simplistic and more than a little patronising. As we all know, the virus is not spread by opening your front door. It’s spread by coming into contact with other people. But based on the narrow Stay at Home slogan, talking to someone in your street from a distance, sunbathing, sitting on a park bench, travelling to a second home or simply going for a drive has turned conscientious citizens into criminals.

Now we find out that even the two-metre rule is not actually accurate. Depending upon who you listen to it’s between a metre and a metre and a half, which may not mean much to us as individuals but for institutions, offices, pubs and restaurants trying to work out how to operate, it means quite a lot.

Despite the talk of expertise and "the science", there is not only a mindless simplicity to the Stay at Home slogan but also a puritanical undertone. Scotland’s National Clinical Director Jason Leitch has even managed to start a row by suggesting golf courses should stay closed because it wouldn’t be fair on single parents: allowing some groups to enjoy themselves while others remain stuck in their homes would apparently send out the wrong message.

And as we know, the little people need a clear message – even if there is no science to back it up and it makes no sense.

The Stay at Home approach is wrong. It is wrong because it is not scientific. It is wrong because it is based upon a lack of trust in the public. And it is wrong because it is forcing us all to live far more limited lives than we need to be living. It’s time the Scottish Government started talking to us as adults rather than as children who need simplistic slogans.

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