The Tory legacy that should worry us most is not economic

Over the past few years, the Conservatives have displayed a streak that is really too malign to be dismissed as mean. It didn’t begin with Brexit, but that vote spelled the end of the Cameron era and his favourite oxymoron: “compassionate Conservatism”.

In truth, compassion has never been the virtue of choice for a party whose longest-serving Home Secretary – yup, that woman May again – ushered in the term “hostile environment” with regard to those seeking a place of safety in the UK. You’ll recall she also sent vans round the country telling people to go home or else.

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That unlovely message has been ramped up by her successors who have now told people like refugees from Afghanistan, which we abandoned to the Taliban, that our obligations to them are over and so too any offers of accommodation bar barges and disused military huts.

This ultimatum is couched in different terms depending on the issuer. For the more upmarket Tories like Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick or Justice Minister Alex Chalk, it’s a sort of take-it-or-leave-it “we don’t offer a menu of choices”. Or, at the more tabloid end, the views of the ever unlovely Tory deputy chair Lee Anderson: if you don’t like it, “f**k off back to France”. Such a nice boy!

Meanwhile, the full-scale assault on human rights continues apace with thinly veiled threats to the Supreme Court that if they don’t OK a one-way ticket to Rwanda for “failed” asylum seekers, the latter could be outsourced to Ascension Island instead. Or, actually, anywhere the current Home Secretary deems a safe country.

Among the latter is the aforementioned Rwanda, home of the mass genocide of its minority ethnic population just 30 years ago. I’ve just finished reading Fergal Keane’s book on the origins of his post-traumatic stress disorder.

Of all the horrors in all the conflicts he has witnessed over the years, the sights of that civil war’s killing sprees are what tipped his psyche over the edge, he reckons. For some time afterwards, he couldn’t even bear to hear the name Rwanda uttered in the media.

However, the UK Government and its Prime Minister’s obsession with “stopping the boats” are the least of what we need to worry about. Not least since the desperate souls on the boats represent a tiny proportion of migrants and the core problem remains the abject failure to deal with the massive backlog of delayed asylum claims.

And, although it’s true they’ve made a grand job over the past decade and more of tanking the UK economy and playing footsie with bankruptcy, that too is not top of my panic list.

It is, however, top of the Labour Party’s one. Not a week goes by without a screeching handbrake turn on a policy which sounded as if it might help to address widespread inequalities or galloping global warming. Then Sir Keir (below) and his former banker and trainee chancellor take fright at the thought of the likely cost.

And don’t hold your breath for them to raid the Trident kitty, plug the many holes in the windfall tax or make wealthy tax dodgers pay their dues. They may call themselves the Labour Party, but their relationship to folk who actually labour is somewhat tenuous.

“Red Tories” is an easy and cheap jibe, but it only gained currency when the erstwhile party of the people decided that supporting hard-pressed punters was too expensive a hobby. Thus the endorsement of the hated two-child cap on benefits with its grotesque rape clause. Thus the refusal to row back on policies like the bedroom tax.

It is, at the end of the political day, a matter of choosing your priorities. Sir Keir’s priorities might find the chap after whom he was named fair birling in his grave.

Yet even a crashed economy, with all the pain and grief it has brought the UK citizenry, has to be further down the fear and loathing chart than the way in which the Conservative government has mounted a wholesale attack on civil liberties, while rendering the role of the backbench MP to one of impotent bystander.

Two important books sum this up. One, by the political journalist Ian Dunt, says it all in the title: How Westminster Works, And Why It Doesn’t. The other, Code Of Conduct, comes out in a few days’ time and has been penned by Chris Bryant, chair of the all-party committee on standards and privileges.

You know, the one which concluded former PM Boris Johnson might have been a wee thing economical with the truth when telling the Commons that partygate – the lockdown revelries at No 10 – were nothing more than a fond farewell to a hard-working colleague. Or two. Or three. Or more. Or the day he got ambushed by a birthday cake. As you do.

THE burden of both these books is that the system of parliamentary government has been so degraded that the normal rules of engagement no longer apply.

Issues which would once have been the subject of forensic examination in committee are wheeched through in hours. Ministers use and abuse so-called statutory instruments – the dull-sounding term for a wholesale power grab that allows them to make and amend policy on the hoof – without the tedious business of having to introduce new legislation.

So we find our ability to peacefully protest sabotaged, and a whole panoply of what were once thought basic human rights now under threat as the Government enthuses about leaving the European Convention on Human Rights which underpins just about everything we once held dear. The things which distinguish a basically civilised democracy from an authoritarian regime which resists any challenge to its diktats.

So this current UK government isn’t just mad, bad and very dangerous to know, but its Labour opposition is running so scared of being thought liable to raise taxes or make spending pledges that they nod through a raft of illiberal policies. Tell me this and tell me no more – how could any political party think the electorate will buy the idea that the exchequer is safe in Tory hands?

We in Scotland are in the fortunate position of having other options. We can choose to cut ourselves free of this carnage and make our own choices as a nation. Choices which give us a chance of replicating the success of other small independent nations.

Alternatively, we can stick with the Tweedledum and Tweedledee model of UK politics.

Then wonder afresh what all those nice policemen are doing stopping us from protesting that the poor are getting poorer, the food banks are running out of food, the weans and their families are going hungry.

The climate catastrophes are increasing, the refugees are drowning and this energy-rich country of ours is housing ever-larger numbers of people in real fuel poverty.

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Which is why many folks are asking why we sold off so much of our energy potential to the lowest bidders.

We “whingeing jocks”, far from putting out a begging bowl, are given pocket money from our own taxes. Less than we pay in, mind, since all those shiny big weapons have to be paid for.

Periodically, someone comes up from Westminster to hand out sweeties to councils who promise not to agitate for indy. Without, of course, bothering to consult our parliament.

We’ve been systematically deprived of the wealth which other similar nations have prudently saved for a rainy day. And boy is it pouring right now.