Coronavirus: Nicola Sturgeon relies on public trust as she plans to ease lockdown in Scotland
Some businesses are becoming frustrated as they see more progress on lifting the lockdown south of the border.
Friday 22 May 2020 09:52, UK
Nothing's easy in the search for the sweet spot between lockdown and its lifting.
A matter of life and death for the economy. And actual life and death.
We spent the morning filming in a garden centre, where no-one was claiming their business should be more important to politicians than the business of saving lives.
What the business needs, though, is a strategy that can help save their future.
Scotland's garden centres are the last in Europe to reopen. In some places, they never closed.
Managers wonder why they have not been able to sell garden products when supermarkets and the like have been able to service the spring planting season.
They argue their stores have the space, while gardens are good for mental health.
With more measured judgement, they say, why haven't they been allowed to keep their doors open?
Keeping them closed, of course, meant fewer people were drawn outdoors.
Garden centres were, perhaps, another necessary casualty of blanket closure - a decision simplified by its uniformity.
What these businesses need now is political agility. They need the sort of thinking that pulls divergent strands of the economy into a framework that offers a future.
In easing the lockdown north of the border until later, Nicola Sturgeon stirred consternation in parts of Scotland's business community at a sense of progress over the border.
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Ms Sturgeon emphasised the importance of erring on the side of caution.
She has bought patience with her performance so far - that much is reflected in opinion polls.
How she carries a country forward now depends on safety, yes, but also a sureness of touch that the public can trust.
That trust will be underpinned, as will progress itself, by the effectiveness of coronavirus testing, and Scotland's first minister knows it.
Her government's numbers on testing have, so far, not been up to capacity.
"Test and Protect", as it has now been coined north of the border, has been criticised - by Ms Sturgeon's opponents at least - as far short of where it needs to be for lifting the lockdown.
In politics, as in life, lifting might yet be as hard as locking down.