POPULAR versus populist. Two similar words with completely different meanings in recent weeks – it seems you cannot pick up a paper that does not contain an opinion poll or a trust poll conducted by “they, them and the others”.
What is incredible about the results is just how popular Nicola Sturgeon is. Remember, the First Minister is now into her seventh year as party boss and leading a party that is in its fourth consecutive term of government.
Some may say that the only poll the counts is the one that happens via the ballot box and they would be correct, and what a resounding endorsement for policies and individuals we witnessed on May 6.
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All of this achieved in the face of a completely hostile press and news coverage. One after one the Unionist candidates were paraded for all to hear and every single one of them was left with their smirk well and truly wiped from their faces, their tails firmly placed between their legs.
As a result, we here in Scotland have a popular leader, a leader not scared to make the tough calls and be seen as the one making those calls. Day in, day out, the First Minister has stood before the cameras, stood before the nation and delivered the news on the pandemic – and unlike the populist leader south of the Rio Tweed, there was no revolving carousel of ministers to take the heat off one person.
But that is Johnson for you. He only wants to be associated with success. At no time in his career, at no time in his life, has he taken responsibility for his actions. He is the very worst that his class of people can produce, but yet he has open access to a press corps and news channels that never question him, never investigate the excesses of his administration, and that is when that administration has squandered public money on projects that failed and failed again to deliver relief when the pandemic was at its zenith.
After all, he was put in place for one thing and one thing only, and that was to get Brexit done, nothing else concerns his masters, they wanted the UK out of the EU at all costs.
So Johnson promised jam today, jam tomorrow – in fact, it was a case of never-ending jam and all he wanted was your vote. The world, he said, was queuing up to strike trade deals, and those countries that were not … well, they had nothing that good old Blighty wished for.
His co-conspirators in the press managed to make devils out of the EU and scapegoats out of asylum seekers. Once more the world witnessed a political leader drive populist ideas to blind the voters to the real ambition of an ultra-right-wing ideology.
As I have said before and will never tire in stating, there is nothing roguish about him, nothing public schoolboy about his presentation, nothing likeable in his character. He is a cold, calculating, ultra-right-wing megalomaniac that does not care for how many die out with his circle because after all we are but plebs to be used, abused, then thrown on to the scrap heap.
I think one of the saddest sights in Scottish politics is watching the minions of the Tory Party flutter from their branch office north of the Rio Tweed and sing the praises of Johnson. This they do for reasons best known to themselves, possibly in the hope they get scraps from the top table of the colonial party – scraps, they pray, with a bit of added Windsor family bling attached.
Our way out, of course, is to vote in the next referendum for an independent Scotland.
Our way out of the mire that is UK politics is to vote to ensure that Holyrood is answerable to the electorate of Scotland on all aspects of government and we no longer are ruled from a foreign capital. Our future is bright, Independence is right.
Cliff Purvis
Veterans for Scottish Independence 2.0
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