THE promise of a chair at the top table seems to have melted the Scottish Green Party’s commitment to cardinal human rights principles. To protect their power-sharing deal with the SNP, the Scottish Greens voted for illiberal, authoritarian, and discriminatory vaccine passports.

Co-leader Patrick Harvie’s very recent sentiments on these wretched ID cards were that they “could set a dangerous precedent for the longer term in that people’s civil rights would be dependent on their medical history”. Too right.

Then, all of a sudden, he changed his mind.

I can only conclude that toadying in with the SNP matters more to Mr Harvie than being true to his party’s principles, as outlined by Caroline Lucas, the UK’s only Green Party MP.

Ms Lucas, who generally has a more thoughtful position on complex issues than many of her colleagues, has said that she will vote against the imposition of vaccine passports.

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“I don't think that vaccination should be mandatory. Requiring a vaccine passport for access to a nightclub, for example, is a slippery slope and I think it should be opposed on that basis.”

Ms Lucas understands that there are some groups of people for whom vaccination is not an option, and stresses that “we should be avoiding anything that creates a divisive two-tier system, with unvaccinated citizens denied the same rights as vaccinated citizens”.

If the precedent of vaccine passports is introduced for nightclubs, she reminds us, that paves the way for them being used to access housing or other kinds of health care.

“There’s rightly very serious concern about the consequences for already excluded and disadvantaged communities”.

Ms Lucas has the brains to see that vaccine passports could be a Trojan Horse for a Chinese-style social credits pass system, the thin end of an authoritarian wedge.

Slowly but surely, our lives could become impossible unless we conform to the latest government ordinance.

Don’t say you weren't warned. This horrible new world order, the steady erosion of freedoms we previously took for granted, could all be built from your vaccine passport.

Unlike her Scottish counterparts, Ms Lucas, who encourages people to get vaccinated, applies lucid logic. “Someone’s vaccination status is no guarantee they are not carrying the virus”, she points out.

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So when Ms Sturgeon and Mr Harvie push through vaccine passports in the teeth of considerable opposition, they are actually behaving recklessly.

It is now beyond argument that vaccinated people can both contract Covid and pass it on to other people, yet the vaccine pass proposition is predicated on the dangerously faulty assumption that double vaccination removes the risk of infection.

Counter-intuitive as it may seem, we really must digest the hard fact that however much we may wish that they did, vaccines do not stop transmission. And any argument that they at least reduce infection is contradicted by the example of Israel.

This country, which has the highest vaccination rates in the world, now has the highest Covid infection rates in the world, despite the fact that its population is now being dragooned into taking third and fourth booster shots.

The latest evidence from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the UK Government, and Oxford University shows that the Delta variant is evading the current Covid-19 vaccines.

In particular, the CDC study focused on 469 cases among Massachusetts residents who attended indoor and outdoor public gatherings over a two week period. It found that 346 of the cases were among vaccinated residents, with 1.2% being hospitalised.

The remaining 123 cases were among the unvaccinated population with just 1 person being hospitalised (0.8%).

No-one in either group died.

The CDC study also found that viral loads were very similar among vaccinated and unvaccinated people, in other words, they were equally infectious.

But this bull-headed, counterproductive, arguably dangerous Scottish vaccine pass system, means that a double vaccinated person who is infected with Covid will be waved through at the nightclub door, while an unvaccinated person who is Covid-free is barred.

Even in Wales, where Mark Drakeford has not flinched from enacting draconian restrictions, more reason prevails. The Welsh Covid Pass will allow people to show they have had a negative lateral flow test result within the last 48 hours, instead of proof of vaccination.

If reducing infection, rather than vaccine coercion, is the stated purpose, we would test everyone for entry, irrespective of whether or not they are vaccinated.

It’s simply not good enough to massively restrict our freedom on the basis of a lazy, scientifically illiterate assumption that vaccines are a magic bullet.

Yet despite the fact that the transmission prevention argument for vaccine passports has crumbled, Ms Sturgeon, bolstered by the Greens, ploughs on with her mistaken protocol.

Covid, with its 0.096 infection mortality rate, which is on a par with influenza, is now endemic. When vaccine protection wanes within six months, the hope of permanently eliminating transmission through wholesale vaccination fades.

In this context, the term ‘passport’, when attached to the word ‘vaccine’, constitutes Orwellian ‘doublespeak’: an abuse of language that deliberately reverses true meaning.

Passports enable you to go places and do things. Vaccine passports make your freedom conditional on rolling up your sleeve every time a new booster rolls out, indefinitely.

Fear-triggered mandates over the last 18 months has conditioned us to forget what real freedom is. As Lord Sumption, former senior Supreme Court judge, says. “The British public has not yet even begun to understand the seriousness of what is happening in our country. Many of them, perhaps most of them, don’t care, or won’t care, until it’s too late.

"They instinctively feel that the ends justify the means, the motto of every totalitarian regime that has ever existed.”

Patrick Harvie should reflect on his wise words and pull the plug on vaccine passports, even if this wrecks his precious coalition. It is the pivotal issue of our times.

When you need a government-approved QR code to access your freedom, you have already relinquished it.

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