PRIME MINISTER Boris Johnson is currently visiting Scotland, hoping to show the strength of the union.

His government’s woeful handling of the coronavirus crisis and the comparably better handling of the crisis by the devolved administrations would suggest otherwise.

While we may reserve criticism for the Scottish government’s initial tailgating of Johnson’s dithering approach to this crisis, moving wildly from the initial disastrous “herd immunity” strategy to the supposed following of more conventional science, it takes a certain breed of fool to think that the overseeing of thousands of needless deaths conjures up images of anything approaching strength.

At this point in time, no one man has done more for the cause of Scottish independence than “Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson.”

While we might also criticise the number of deaths in Scotland and the Scottish government’s handling of this crisis, there can be no doubt that it has been made to look almost Midas-like in comparison to the Johnson government’s willy-nilly train wreck.

Where Nicola Sturgeon stands exuding some semblance of leadership each day, a pack of rag-tag charlatans flip a coin on whose turn it is to look the fool before the nation, until they grew bored of that too and cancelled it.

Just as they moved the goalposts by changing how we measure Covid-19 related deaths, now they look to turn their woeful handling of this crisis into some sort of sign of Britain’s vigour.

It is despite Johnson’s government and any rose-tinted notion of “one-nation” Toryism that we are where we are.

It is the many millions of NHS workers and ordinary working-class citizens that have come together to support one another through this crisis that have stopped things deteriorating any further.

Yet it is these same millions of NHS workers and ordinary working-class citizens who will suffer the brunt of the next financial crash, which economists predict will be far worse than the one experienced in 2008.

Just days ago, Johnson proudly declared a pay rise for public-sector workers, yet it was later announce that this only included teachers, doctors and police officers.

No mention of the thousands of the low-paid nurses, domestics, auxiliary staff, mental health workers and those in private and social care homes, the majority of which are women, migrant workers, or both.

There should be righteous uproar when these workers realise claps on a Thursday night don’t equate to food on the table or bills being paid.

Furthermore, it is important to note the positive impact that trade unions have had on working-class people during this pandemic — material gains for our class such as the furlough scheme were the result of strong worker collectives and serve to only highlight the need for all workers to join, organise in and become their union.

It is literally a case of life or death — and communists in the workplace should be more committed than ever to building worker power through the unions and wider labour movement.

Additionally, in our shift to a hopefully green economy, workers must of course be at the forefront of this “just transition” and this should include things like the scrapping of Trident — and this means continuing our work with CND and the wider peace movement, domestically and globally.

We must be clear in our criticism: neither Westminster nor Holyrood have supported the very people who put them in to power — and we must use this crisis to our advantage where we can us it, us it to push for a federal, socialist republic of Britain, one fit for and built by working people.