WITH recent opinion polls showing that the Conservatives are facing the prospect of electoral annihilation in Scotland at the next Westminster General Election, we should have been looking forward to expelling the arrogant patrician Tory Alister Jack from Scottish public life and ensuring that he no longer has any influence over our laws or public policy-making. 

As Scotland Secretary, Jack has very much proven that he sees himself as Westminster's man in Scotland and not Scotland's man in Westminster. Throughout his inglorious career, Jack has not once tried to ensure that Scotland's interests are represented or taken into account in the government of which he is still a part.

READ MORE: Alister Jack and Nadine Dorries to get Lords seats on Boris Johnson's honours list

Instead, he has striven to bend Scotland to the will of a Conservative government and a Brexit that Scotland has rejected at the polls. Jack has rubber-stamped Brexit, Tory austerity cuts and every damaging Westminster decision imposed on Scotland. Not once has he attempted to moderate Conservative policy in order to take Scotland's views and needs into account.

But Scotland's views and needs do not matter to Jack – he made his views on Scotland's status clear in an exchange with SNP MP Deidre Brock during a Westminster committee meeting when the MP for Edinburgh North and Leith raised fears about the funding of projects in her constituency which bypassed the Scottish Government and undermined the devolution settlement.

The Conservatives don't have even the flimsiest pretence of a mandate from the people of Scotland for their assault on the devolution settlement, despite an actual Vow on faux parchment paper that the Conservatives would respect the devolution settlement and would never do anything to affect it without the express consent of the Scottish Parliament.

Jack did not attempt to assuage the concerns of the SNP MP. He did not even try to assure her that her fears might be misplaced. Instead, he spoke like a colonial governor general, slapping down an uppity local peasant, and loftily instructed her: "We took the decision right at the beginning to practice real devolution and we’re standing by it, so you ought to suck it up and go with the programme."

In Jack's eyes, “real devolution” is whatever he and his Westminster cronies decide it is going to be – there is to be no negotiation, no give and take. The sole duty of the Caledonian natives is to accept whatever is given to them and be grateful for it. And if they tug their forelocks while doing so, so much the better.

Jack is one of those Scottish Tory MPs who on current polling look set to lose their seats, but it has now been announced that he is to be nominated for a peerage in Boris Johnson's resignation honours list, presumably for services to toadying.

This means that even when Jack is turfed out of the Commons by the people he purports to represent, he will simply move to the Lords where he will continue to influence our laws and public policy without having to pretend that he has to represent anyone in Scotland. 

Naturally, the entitled patrician that he is, Jack has reportedly decided to delay formally taking up the peerage until the end of this Parliament in order to prevent a by-election being triggered, because heaven forfend that the little people get any say.

The very same day that the news of Jack's impending peerage broke, it was announced that Scotland is to lose two MPs in the boundary review of Westminster constituencies. Scotland is already heavily outnumbered in the Commons, but it's about to get even worse. We lose the politicians that we vote for and that we can vote out of office, but gain more of those that we don't vote for, and whom we cannot get rid of. This is how “democracy” works in the Westminster system.

Jack now joins Ruth Davidson, Michael Forsyth and George Foulkes among those unelected politicians who literally lord it over us and whom Scotland can never hold to account. 

There is only one way that Scotland can put an end to the disgrace to democracy that is the House of Lords, and that is with independence, when not only will we no longer have to put up with unelected politicians who cannot be held to account, we will have an elected parliament which will always be responsive to Scotland's needs and directly accountable to the people of Scotland.

This piece is an extract from today’s REAL Scottish Politics newsletter, which is emailed out at 7pm every weekday with a round-up of the day's top stories and exclusive analysis from the Wee Ginger Dug.

To receive our full newsletter including this analysis straight to your email inbox, click HERE and click the "+" sign-up symbol for the REAL Scottish Politics