AMONG some Scottish liberals who really ought to know better, the rush to canonise Joe Biden has reached sickening levels of obsequiousness. This seems to rest on nothing more than that the new president-elect of the US is not Donald Trump. Some have even suggested that the victory of Biden and his running mate Kamala Harris is a triumph for the American left. If it wasn’t for the Covid I’d be tempted to run a supporters bus from Finnieston and Glasgow’s west end to Biden’s inauguration ceremony in January.

We’ll leave aside for a moment that on the spectrum of global politics the American Democratic Party is located within the same bandwidth as African warlords and the Australian Labour Party. Come back to me when they stop electrocuting prisoners or start banning ownership of guns. Or when the police stop murdering black men acting suspiciously. If a Joe Biden presidency makes the slightest difference for good in these areas I’ll break out the bunting myself. But I hae ma doots.

Some even claim to have been moved to tears by Biden’s victory. Presumably, they were joined by some of America’s biggest corporate donors, who have long enjoyed – how can I put this – a “mutually beneficial” relationship with Biden. On the other hand those men whom Harris as California’s pre-eminent law officer fought to keep in jail even after they’d had their convictions overturned, will have been shedding tears of rage.

In an article for the New York Times, the law academic, Lara Bazelon, who runs a project for victims of legal injustice in Los Angeles, wrote: “In her career, Ms Harris did not barter or trade to get the support of more conservative law-and-order types, she gave it all away.” Judge Rinder would run rings round her over compassionate justice.

On Monday Gordon Brown described Biden as a great conciliator, presumably on the basis of Barack Obama using him as a message boy to placate Republicans in the Senate in the knowledge that Biden has spent most of his political career drinking and eating with them and soliciting financial support from the companies run by their friends.

Certainly, Biden has to be better than Donald Trump, but so would anyone with an ounce of empathy for their fellow human beings.

It’s worrying when you see some of those who purport to be left-wing praising a chap who has successfully resisted all attempts in his five decades at Washington to locate a set of values that might be considered radical or even just a wee bit, you know, leftish. On social media I was accused of being “a Stalinist” by some roaster for daring to suggest such a thing. Was he referring to the bloke whom the Stranglers wrote about in the 1970s, or was it the other guy?

The bizarre celebrations for Biden just because he isn’t Donald Trump and won’t deploy racist language and will start being nice foreigners is indicative of something that has come to infantilise Scottish politics too.

Those people who took to social media to proclaim this old Washington fixer and his “tough on crime” running mate as heroes of the left were indulging in a sort of narcissism. This is rooted in the politics of identity that has lately come to replace that which effects real change in real time for real communities which have been scarred by the politics of greed and neo-liberalism. “Look at me: I’m really, really switched on and pure, dead progressive and edgy.” They’re about as progressive as celebrity bake-off.

In Scotland, I suppose, it’s best represented by the woke sector which has found favour within the SNP and which enjoys a disproportionate measure of influence within the party’s all-powerful National Executive Committee. Thus those who identify as “woke” and do that him/his pronoun thing on their Twitter bios have replaced the mission to make policies which will lift communities out of poverty with a set of designer slogans and an obsession with catching the eye of the SNP leadership. And, who knows, if they play their cards right a wee place on the party list for Holyrood awaits and an MSP’s salary.

Named Persons, smacking children, banning the Buckfast and attacking people of faith matter more than ending the cycles of poverty, inequality and injustice that have enslaved Scotland’s working-class communities since the reign of Queen Victoria. Ask yourself why, after 20 years of devolved government in health, policing and education it’s still the same communities who bear the brunt of these.

Coronavirus has highlighted this wretchedly where deaths from Covid-19 in our poorest communities were running at three times the average at the height of the pandemic. But hey, who cares about that if you can shout loudly about gender reform and participate in social media campaigns to cancel those who stand accused of the unforgivable sin of not being sufficiently diverse?

THUS, it was gratifying to see the success of the Common Weal group of SNP candidates in the party selection lists during this nomination process for next year’s elections. A third of successful candidates have pledged to back a pledge which will address real issues affecting the people of Scotland and not the contrived posturing which has characterised too much of the party’s social and cultural agenda.

The pledge for a resilient independent Scotland lays out several key commitments which include a national care service, meaningful land reform, tenants’ rights, public ownership and localised economic reform. It’s a suite of policies which those working-class communities which came over to Yes in 2014 have been waiting for.

Crucially, the Common Weal group has the potential to become a powerful bloc within the party capable of ending the recent obsession with identity politics. It will put the class discrimination which have left many Scottish communities unprotected from the ravages of neo-liberalism and the false belief that inward investment and bending the knee to big business alone can sustain economies and protect the incomes of the poorest in our society.

In due course, it’s to be hoped that these “Common Weal types” (copyright: Stewart McDonald and assorted rockets) will eventually remove the woke warriors who dominate the NEC. These people have lately elevated the cult of identity in the SNP and have exploited the juicy career opportunities that come with it. Time for the party to return to the mission of delivering an independent Scotland in which the ancient patterns of societal inequality and poverty can be destroyed and replaced with something truly radical and not look-at-me cheerleading.