Just when you thought that the Nasty Party had been put away along comes an election campaign to shatter such illusions. For a number of years David Cameron worked very hard to lose the Tories the label of “the Nasty Party” which Michael Howard etc had deservedly earned.
Annabel Goldie and then Ruth Davidson had done their bit to help lose that tag and earn a bit of electoral credibility and crucially acceptability. That work has, at least in Scotland, been undone over the course of the campaign for the Council Elections.
Now the Tories have a toxic mixture of:
- past membership of the BNP (Neil Graham in Refrewshire) http://files.heraldscotland.com/politics/15224625.Tory_candidate_denies_BNP_link_despite_details_in_database/?ref=rss,
- former kipper, now right wing Tory, in Moray, Donald Gatt advocating the end of fertility treatment
- Ken MacBrayne, a candidate for the Tories in Benbecula, who was suspended after party bosses were alerted to a series of vile comments about Nicola on his social media. The 72-year-old described the SNP leader as a “stupid little cretin” and a “silly wee cow”. In another post he wrote: “Wouldn’t it be a great idea if somebody stuck a dolop of duck tape over Nicola Sturgeons mouth and covered her head with a bag. After that they could deposit her in the middles [sic] of the Kalahari desert WITHOUT a compass. That way we would all get some peace from her constant braying about independence.”
You really do have to wonder just how nasty, evil or racist you have to be for Davidson’s Nasty Party to refuse to select you as a standard bearer.
And that is without Ruthless Davidson’s defence of the horrendous “Rape Clause”!
It seems that Bexit really has encouraged the backwoodsmen of the hard right to discard their camouflage and display their true colours.
The idiots who are still kippers however take things just a step too far! Nothing unusual there I suppose.
Not content with taking a massive wrecking ball to the UK economy they manage to find a candidate with some to say the least, rather unsettling views on castration, flogging and the use of guillotines. Not to mention a frightening degree of attraction for gorillas. Well they are frightening if you are a male gorilla!
Gisela Allen said “Do you think I am going all over the city and saying my idea of a sexually-attractive creature is a gorilla? When I go to a zoo and I see a gorilla my hormones go absolutely crazy. I find a gorilla very attractive.” http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/15240329.Ukip__39_s_new_Scots_candidate_backs_guillotines__castration_and_flogging_____and_you_should_hear_her_views_on_gorillas/
To add to this the kippers have decided to ban the wearing of the burqa and in perhaps the most frightening proposal so far of this General Election want to introduce a mandatory check for female genital mutilation (fmg). Now fmg is an utterly barbaric practice and is rightly illegal but which utter idiot came up with the idea of a mandatory check?
Who is to be checked? Who will carry out these checks? At what age(s) will they be carried out? Will all girls be checked or just those deemed “necessary” by the lunatics should they ever acquire the keys to the asylum?
This display of the real face of Nasty face of Unionism comes with a severe health warning for the future of Scottish politics. The days of consensus are well and truly over. Strangely, the greatest danger from this lies not for the Tories, who are after all just reverting to type, but for the Labour Party.
Even as I write there are negotiations going on between Labour and Tory groups in places like Falkirk and Stirling where they have been in coalition, to keep things as “business as usual” after the polls have closed with the sole aim of keeping the SNP from power. Having learned nothing from 2015 and 2016, they are preparing to clamber back into bed and pretend that they really are better together. Truly the blind leading the blind.
Labour have paid a very high price for the calamitous decision to kip up with the Tories and it seems that far from learning the obvious lessons they are as our American cousins put it “doubling down” on that strategy. With the loss of all but one seat at Westminster, being reduced to 3rd place in Holyrood one might have thought that the wiser council of Alex Rowley might be heard over the mindless chanting of their principal mantra “SNPBAD! SNPBAD!” If ever it was true that you can be defined as much by your enemies as your friends this has to be a classic.
As we head out of this campaign and onto ScotRef two things become clear.
One, is that the right wing press has made it blindingly obvious that the ScotRef campaign will be characterised by nastiness, untruths and misinformation. Better Together and their Project Fear were just the learning model. We see already the willingness of the idiot fringe of yoonion[sm to go to extreme lengths by the recent incidents at SNP Parliamentary offices and HQ.
In this we also see the failure of journalists and journalism in the majority of outlets to cover this deliberate attempt to intimidate us. Just think back to the coverage given to the egg throwing incident with Jim Murphy and compare it to the coverage given to at least three incidents at SNP offices. It’s one thing to complain about the editorial lines being taken, it’s something else when these attacks are effectively condoned by the failure to report, far less condemn, them. Just serves to underline the importance of The National.
The second obvious thing is that there is now a steady stream of people for whom the yoons “modus operandi” is no longer acceptable. These people are facing a difficult decision, often after years of commitment to a cause they once believed in. Everything is changed, changed utterly, as a result of Brexit, there is no route which does not involve major change. They are struggling to accept that a new reality as dawned and with it comes the need for new answers.
We must always be willing to reach out the hand of friendship to anyone who decides that as the facts have changed, so to have their opinions. They face a difficult trip and we must make it as easy as possible for them to not only come and join us but to enable them to encourage their former friends to make the same trip.
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