IT is a strange thing that whilst politics is undoubtedly a team sport it often appeals to those who are most desperate to stand out from the crowd.
At its extremes that paradox throws up politicians who find it impossible to work as part of a larger unit and to compromise in order to make collective progress.
Often the problem is not with policy but with personality, in that their opinion of themselves is somewhat higher than that held by others (George Galloway is a case in point). So, eventually, trailing a fiery cloud of rhetoric as they depart from their original political home off they go to set up their own show, claiming they haven’t left their party, their party has left them.
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That self centred phrase is in itself of course very revealing so it was no surprise to hear a variant of it from the self absorbed Michelle Ballantyne. Michelle, once a contender for the Scottish Tory leadership, has never been shy of claiming that her very dodgy opinions brook no contradiction and now she has found herself a gang which will also treat them as gospel.
Of course we haven’t been told how big or small the gang is, nor does it presently get to elect who leads it. However we do know that the Reform party, in which Michelle has become the appointed Scottish leader, is the renamed Brexit party, most of whose members came from UKIP which itself was an offshoot of both the extreme right of the Tories and some even less savoury political by-ways.
What it intends to do is clear from its website. This claims that having “rescued Brexit (and) restored some confidence in democracy in the UK” – an assertion that voters in Scotland might not recognise – it is now time for what it calls an “alternative” strategy on Covid based on something called the “Great Barrington Declaration”.
This grand sounding document was drafted by the American Institute for Economic Research – a libertarian think tank which has engaged in climate change denial – and advocates a so called risk-based approach to the pandemic. But the World Health Organisation has made it clear that it views it as dangerous and unethical, lacking as it does a sound scientific basis. The American Public Health Association went further describing it as “not a strategy but a political statement… (ignoring) sound public health expertise”.
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Significantly they went on to observe that it “preys on a frustrated populace” whilst Antony Fauci, who has been a beacon of light in the Trump darkness around the virus, simply said it was “total nonsense” and would lead to a large number of avoidable deaths.
Michell Ballantyne however disagrees. On Wednesday she took that disagreement to a Parliamentary level by forcing a vote against essential lockdown regulations that had already been passed by the Scottish Parliament’s Covid committee.
No doubt she wanted to be seen and heard in her new guise but what was really alarming was not only that two Tories voted with her on the key issue (a further vote on church restrictions got even more Tory support and abstentions) but that her tone and approach already seems to be rubbing off on the Scottish Tory leadership if their actions and words last week are anything to go by.
Of course normal politics is still with us, though it would be better if Tory spin, bluster and misinformation did not, at the very least, interfere with the work being done to save lives. But abnormal politics is also in play now with the emergence of a Scottish branch office of the Reform Party.
This development, the Tories have realised with some alarm, could poach voters from the right who are fatigued by the demands of the current difficult times and willing (as we have seen in America) to believe the sellers of pandemic snake oil.
So what we saw at Holyrood last week was, in my view, just the beginning of a process in which the Scottish Tories will seek to associate themselves with views which, according to Professor Devi Sridhar (above) at Edinburgh University, “don’t make much sense”, and are neither “accurate” nor “scientific”.
That can’t be to the benefit of any part of the Scottish population, faced as we all still are with a highly dangerous threat. So before it goes any further they need to think carefully about the actual cost of knee-jerk reaction to a turncoat who they rejected as leader only months ago.
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