I WRITE as we face up to an international emergency and how we deal with this globally, nationally and locally is urgent.

It is also important that we get it right. Experience from South Korea show us how this should and should not be handled.

I am afraid that the UK Government has failed to provide personal protective equipment to our frontline healthcare workers, and to provide sufficient virus testing kits at an early stage to prevent the current lockdown and risk trajectory.

This crisis proves that the Tories are incompetent in government and capitalism is bankrupt.

However, I also have concerns about our council being run by diktat from Edinburgh.

I attended two meetings recently where it was decided that our schools should stay open until the holidays on April 3 unless the Scottish Government ordered us otherwise.

Nevertheless, our schools had to close on March 20. In my view, which I expressed at the educational services committee, this would cause an unnecessary risk to senior citizens by closing the schools two weeks early.

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Parents are suffering economic hardship because of this and relying on elderly grandparents to provide child care, exposing them to unnecessary risk.

I have already criticised this SNP administration for deferring to the Scottish Government and senior officers of council.

Life is precious, and democracy is also precious. We risk either at our peril.

Just today, I find that my constituents were not informed of the decision to suspend uplifts of recyclables in blue bins. When they try to call the council, they cannot get through.

As Lenin once said, or was it Churchill: “Don’t let a good crisis go to waste.”

I am not suggesting that we are heading for dictatorship, like in Hungary, but a democratic deficit is emerging.

Labour brought a motion to council last month asking for the health board to be held to account for effectively closing the GP out-of-hours service at the Vale of Leven Hospital.

The SNP administration defeated this and gave the health board another five months to get their act together.

I have just written to the Scottish Government’s cabinet secretary for health, Jeane Freeman, asking her to intervene.

The people of West Dunbartonshire deserve to be healthy and happy.

And they deserve to be listened to.