I had been in London at the weekend and took the train to the airport on the way home as usual. It was quiet when we boarded and found a seat easily behind an elderly well-to-do couple sitting diagonally on a 4 seater. I soon noticed that the man had edged our suitcase forward and was using it as a convenient armrest whilst reading the paper and wasn’t too happy when the bairn retrieved it suddenly. As the train began to fill, their empty seats remained free of people but laden with bags until a young woman got on with a baby and proceeded to move the bags herself to one seat so she could sit down. The couple were furious at this and the baby conveniently screamed for the rest of the journey.
As we approached Croydon, a favourite place of mine, the man referred to it as Godforsaken, decrying the architecture and the inhabitants before stating this was why he had refused to live in London itself when he was offered chairmanship of an investment bank as he could not stand the thought of his children having to mix with people who would choose to live there as, even though he could control their schooling and activities, it would not have been so easy to do in London and he could never have exposed his children to the fact that some people had so little pride in themselves that they would accept that standard of living. My blood was boiling enough by this stage but he then began to salivate about an article he was reading about Liz Truss. It described how she was saying what the Tory membership wanted to hear and how she was promising all things to all people. He was massively in favour of this; the general Tory membership was little better than the greater uneducated public and it was his calibre of people who truly understood everything and knew what was really going on. It continued in this vein for some time interspersed with how she would sort everything out – the “Scotch” would be stamped down, today’s society where people had aspirations above their station would stop and basically a two tier system would evolve officially. If you couldn’t pay for services then you wouldn’t get them and this would force people to improve their lot as well as ease pressure so that those who could pay wouldn’t have to share or wait.
By this stage the young mother was jiggling the baby around closer and closer to the man while holding them up to her face doing the sniff test and remarking on how they needed to get their nappy changed really soon! Just why this couple had lowered themselves to use public transport and a standard carriage rather than first class is a genuine mystery though but it provided a sobering thought that there are people out there who would prefer to see failure of others to improve their own quality of life.
It was no great surprise to hear that she had of course won the contest and is now installed as Prime Minister. Her entire campaign has indeed been run on being all things to all people – to those who don’t want independence she would remove Holyrood’s powers but to the Scots, we had to remember she was just one of us, spending her younger years in Paisley. She would work to end the crippling energy crisis but would ensure that the biggest financial rewards would go to those who contributed the most. Women’s rights would be in the forefront but it appears only if you’re white and straight. Neither contender would have been a good option for the country but were all you could hope for from how the Tory party has turned in recent years. Historically unpopular in Scotland because of their policies you could have perhaps understood them in recent decades even when you thoroughly disagreed with them but now, the government just seems like a caricature of itself where lie after lie is told to appease those who support them and to look after their own interests at all costs.
As we wait to see just how she will control us north of the border, the Scottish Tory party is continuing to distance themselves as they had been doing in recent years and I wonder how long they will remain tied to their southern counterparts or if even they will have the decency to break free. Having to travel to rural Aberdeenshire to officially become Prime Minister must have seemed like a monumental waste of time when it could all have been done in London but occasions like these when Scotland is vital to procedure shows just how much we are needed and it is not us that needs to stay. I await to see just how many of her pledges and promises that she made actually come to fruition or was it all just a pack of lies to the gullible members. I suspect the latter and although there will be much shouting about Holyrood being above itself, the Tories know just how much they need us and while doing as much as they can to control us, they won’t actually take that final step of prohibition.