Wee Ginger Dug: Why the Scottish Conservatives are utterly dependent on SNP

They are aided and abetted in this by a right-wing media which is all too eager to indulge in the Anglo-British exceptionalism which is the Conservatives’ stock in trade.

This strategy is being recklessly and dangerously played out just now in the north of the island of Ireland as Johnson chooses to trash a protocol which, when he signed it with the EU in October 2019, was hailed by the Prime Minister and his cheerleaders in the right-wing press as a triumph of statecraft that “would give us back control”.

It turns out it would also give us empty supermarket shelves, shortages, soaring prices and massive disruption to the supply chain. Faced with this utter disaster, the Conservatives have instead decided to gaslight the public into believing that telling tens of thousands of EU citizens who worked as delivery and lorry drivers that they are no longer welcome has nothing at all to do with the supply problems which are leaving supermarkets without their usual range of stock and creating shortages of fuel supplies leading to long queues at petrol station forecourts.

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They are also ramping up the rhetoric with the EU about the Northern Irish Protocol, meaning here is a serious risk of a trade war which would compound the problems consumers and producers in the UK are already facing.

It seems that the “freedom” the Brextremists sought was the freedom for the UK to rip up international treaties that it has already agreed to and in the process to turn the UK into a rogue state that cannot be trusted to keep its word at the very same time as the UK desperately needs new trade deals to replace the perfectly good deals the Brexiters ripped up because their

Anglo-British exceptionalism could not countenance the UK being an equal partner with other states.

But as long as the Conservatives can keep manufacturing disputes with the EU, they can continue to pander to the victim fantasies of Anglo-British nationalism and blame the EU for all their ills, conveniently creating a bogeyman to whip up their support and distract from their manifest failures.

The fact that in the process they risk the peace settlement in Northern Ireland and are destroying what is left of the UK’s international reputation means nothing to them. All that matters to the Conservatives are the short-term electoral prospects of the Conservative Party. If that means blowing up British democracy and quite literally blowing up Northern Ireland, so be it.

Dominic Cummings gloated last week that a core part of the Prime Minister’s job is “cheating foreigners”. The Conservatives are quite happy to cheat British citizens too.

The Westminster Conservatives are political pygmies, but they’ve still got their own Mini-Mes in the homunculi of the Scottish Conservatives, a branch office which can only aspire to the lofty heights of political pygmyhood. Where the Westminster Conservatives distract from their manifest shortcomings by demonising Europe and claiming to be the victims of the EU, the Scottish Conservatives play the same trick with the SNP, the Scottish Government and the possibility of Scottish independence.

The Scottish Conservatives inhabit a strange twilight world where nothing in Scotland is the responsibility of the British Government. Everything is the fault of the SNP, despite the fact that it’s the British Government in Westminster which has more power and greater resources and which can and does impose its will on Scotland even where it does not possess a snifter of a pretence of a mandate from the people of Scotland for doing so.

When something happens that has nothing to do with the Scottish Government or the SNP, that doesn’t stop the Scottish Conservatives from taking to social media to blame the SNP anyway. It’s all fuel for the victim fantasies of Scotland’s staunch British nationalists. And in the absence of something happening that can be spun into SNPbaddery, the Tories have no compunction about just making stuff up.

So, for example, the Scottish Tories recently tweeted: “Thousands of Scotland fans were locked out of Hampden at the weekend, until well after kick-off, due to vaccine passport spot checks being in place.”

The claim was flat-out false. The SFA confirmed any delays fans experienced in getting into Hampden had nothing to do with vaccine passport checks. Last month, the Scottish Conservatives were trying to whip up their supporters by blaming the SNP for the decision of the Crown Office and the Lord Advocate that simple possession of class A drugs will lead to a formal police warning instead of automatic prosecution.

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Not only did the Scottish Tories falsely blame the SNP for this decision they also falsely claimed that it would benefit drug dealers. In fact, possession with intent to supply will still be prosecuted, but the Conservatives won’t allow a simple matter like the truth to get in the way of their pursuit of some SNPbad headlines.

None of this should be a surprise. After all, the Conservatives base much of their opposition to Scottish independence on the big lie that supporters of independence, the SNP and the Scottish Government are anti-English racists. They never present any credible evidence for this claim, because there is none, but they keep repeating the same lie anyway.

The Scottish Tories are utterly dependent on the SNP and the possibility of Scottish independence. Without them as scapegoats and demons, the Tories would be nothing but a marginal party on the far edges of Scottish politics, forced to take responsibility for their corrupt and chaotic Westminster colleagues.

So the Scottish Conservatives will continue to lie and will continue to play the victim. It’s all they’ve got.