SOMETIMES you have to repeatedly bang your head against a brick wall because that’s less brain numbing than the utter wilful stupidity of what passes for political commentary in much of the British nationalist media, particularly when it comes to Scotland [Ed: believe it or not, the Dug filed this column before a newspaper ACTUALLY set a baby box on fire].
Once you have successfully induced in yourself all the symptoms of concussion, selective amnesia, and incipient brain damage, you will be able to operate on the mental level of a Scottish Conservative MSP and some of their pals in the press.
READ MORE: Twitter users respond to the Scottish Sun setting a baby box on fire
The Scottish Government gives away a gift to welcome every child born in this country, and it’s turned into a political football.
Scotland, you can’t have anything nice. Not unless you put a Union fleg on the side of it and call it the Great British Baby Box. Then it would be just great and Ruth Davidson would talk about it on Bake Off and do a few of her cheeky photo ops, posing with a stuffed toy. Or the Secretary of State for Scotland, as he’s known more formally.
The cardboard-boxes-don’t reduce-infant-mortality outrage that dominated the papers this week came hot on the heels of the outrage about how babies’ lives could be put at risk if you happen to use your baby box as a skip for household refuse, or if you set fire to it, or if you decide to allow your pet python to use it as a bed alongside your newborn.
READ MORE: Doctors and midwives reassure parents on baby box safety
That particular attack was quickly ridiculed on social media, so not to be undone, a new tack was adopted, and we have a brand-new manufactured scandal to use as a headline on Reporting Scotland, just before the story about the cute kitten, and something to recap after the fitba just to make sure we all know how serious it is.
Can we get a blatantly obvious fact about baby boxes clear once and for all please? Cardboard boxes per se do not have any effect on infant mortality rates. If that were the case there would be a noticeable effect in households with large numbers of weans, because those are also the households which tend to host large numbers of cereal boxes.
It’s not about the baby boxes, it’s about the contents of the baby boxes, but even more importantly it’s about how the box and its contents are a wee bribe to parents to get them to co-operate fully with antenatal care and postnatal care. If you seek medical care and treatment throughout your pregnancy you’ll receive an incentive in the form of a baby box and its useful contents.
It’s effective medical care and treatment throughout and after pregnancy that reduces infant mortality, not a cardboard box, and everything we can do to encourage pregnant women and new mothers to engage fully with medical services is a step towards reducing infant mortality.
That’s the entire point of baby boxes. In that sense, baby boxes do indeed have an effect in reducing infant mortality, in the same way that offering your child a toy light sabre if they co-operate with going to the dentist reduces cavities and fillings.
Toy light sabres by themselves don’t reduce the need for tooth extraction and fillings in children, but using them as bribes to get kids to go to the dentist just might. In the same way it’s not the baby box itself which has the effect, it’s the conditions attached to receiving the baby box. Yet for the past few days we’ve had the ludicrous spectacle of the British nationalist commentariat in Scotland demanding proof that cardboard boxes are effective in reducing infant mortality, and demanding apologies and resignations for supposed claims that cardboard boxes all by themselves reduce infant mortality. Heid, meet wa’.
Cardboard boxes by themselves cannot reduce infant mortality, that ought to be in the realms of the bleedin’ obvious, but using baby boxes and their contents as a means of encouraging people to engage fully with the range of ante and postnatal care on offer can indeed help to reduce infant mortality.
Only, for British nationalists in Scotland on their never-ending search for some new stick with which to beat the SNP could that possibly be a difficult concept.
But what all this is really about is the Tories’ favourite game of: “Oh look, a squirrel in a baby box.” The Conservatives are venal, they’re self-interested, and above all they are cynical opportunists. Even though they manage to display all the symptoms of major concussion, and they certainly give the rest of us a major heidache, they know exactly what they’re doing.
They’re using baby boxes to distract from the complete and utter mess their Westminster colleagues are making of immigration policy, the unfolding train wreck that is Brexit, and their refusal to act on the scandal of Scottish Limited Partnerships being used to facilitate money laundering. And the great majority of the media in Scotland is more than happy to help them do so. That’s the real scandal here.
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