Nicola Sturgeon blasts 'shambolic decision-making' from UK government on air bridge row

Nicola Sturgeon blasted the UK Government’s handling of proposed plans for air bridges at her daily press briefing today.

Labelling decision-making by the UK Government as “shambolic”, the First Minister said the Scottish Government had found the discussions over the plans to allow travel between some countries “challenging”.

She said the Scottish Government had had “little or no notice” of the UK Government’s plans and said the list of countries proposed had changed since the secretary of state for transport, Grant Shapps, blamed the Scottish Government for scuppering the plans on Thursday.

A list of 60 countries is set to be released by the UK Government today detailing where people can travel from to the UK and where UK citizens can travel to.

However, Ms Sturgeon criticised the “shifting sands” of the UK Government’s position and said the Scottish Government would take at least a couple of days to look at the proposals before agreeing to them.

The First Minister added the plans could also be open to legal challenges.

She said: “We have often had limited or no notice of the UK’s proposals and that matters because some of the judgements involved here are difficult and complex.

“Just to illustrate the point about the shifting sands of the UK Government’s position, the list of countries that they were yesterday demanding that the Scottish Government signed up to suggesting that we were a barrier to getting an agreement on is not the same as the list they have shared with us today.

“So we need as the Scottish Government to analyse these proposals properly and rationally and we need to do that obviously from a public health perspective, but we also need to do that from a legal perspective, all of these decisions are of course potentially open to legal challenge.

“When so much is at stake as it is right now, we can’t allow ourselves to be dragged along in the wake of another government’s, to be quite frank about it, shambolic decision-making process, so we will take time to properly and rationally consider this before, hopefully very soon, setting out our own decision.”

The First Minister added that the Scottish Government had concerns over the list of countries being described as “medium risk” but indicated Scotland was likely to agree with the list of those considered “low risk”.

She added that levels of the virus were considered to be five times higher in England than in Scotland, with air bridges providing a “significant” risk of an increase to the rate of infection, more so than in England.

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