IF it is to work, any newspaper column does, I think, require three things. The first is a hero or villain. The second is a big idea. The third is a plot.

The villain of this piece is Kemi Badenoch. I know that there have been other elections of note in the last week, but lest we forget, Badenoch has still not been the leader of the Tories for a week as yet, and that makes her worthy of comment.

The big idea is that the policies that Badenoch (below) will be promoting would be absolutely dire for the people of Scotland and that we need to be aware of this fact and create alternatives.

The plot is that to promote her cause, Badenoch has attached herself to Trump’s coat-tails, simultaneously reinforcing the range of truly appalling policies with which she associates herself whilst clearly indicating that she is indifferent to the fact that he is a convicted felon, a seditionist and a person found by a court to have committed rape.

Having laid out the basis on which this column makes its case, what am I worried about?

Like many commentators, I came late to the Conservative Party leadership contest, feeling it a matter of some irrelevance given how terribly that party polled in the recent general election. I now think I was wrong to do so.

Robert Jenrick was a truly terrible, imperialist, arrogant and self-deluded candidate. He failed.

Badenoch won. She did so on the basis of her quite frightening self-belief, which appears to be based upon her certainty that what the UK wants is a fundamental shift towards far-right politics.

And please note I use the term UK deliberately because I think it very apparent that Badenoch’s worldview does not recognise that Scotland does, in any meaningful way, exist.

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The policy document that she endorsed during her leadership bid reveals remarkable similarities with the programme promoted by Trump (below) as part of his leadership bid this week. That is unsurprising. The think tanks that were responsible for both programmes are deeply entwined, often sharing funding sources, personnel, and ideas. In effect, they share a plot.

That plot presumes that the wealthy are the masters of the universe. They think that we should know that is the case because that is what their wealth proves. They believe that their companies should, as a consequence, be allowed to march unfettered across the economies of the world, pillaging as they choose and leaving the rest of us to pick up the consequences of any of their actions, which regulation must not prevent.

It is also Badenoch’s belief, shared with Trump, that neither politics nor civil servants should ask questions of those companies or seek to hold them to account. She, like Trump, is intent on removing those who she thinks might do so from the civil service.

Upholding the rule of law, seeking to maintain the common good, correcting climate change, making corporations accountable, or, heaven forbid, demanding that they pay a reasonable amount of tax, must not, therefore, be on the agenda of any civil servant, and it is clear that she wishes that anyone who thinks otherwise should lose their job.

A compliant state is her requirement and what she will demand.

She will also require a compliant population. Education, and most especially university education, is a very bad thing in Badenoch’s opinion unless it is provided to people who might agree with her views. Everyone else is a potential critic, and such is her paranoia about being challenged that she thinks they should be denied the right to a university education.

For everyone else, education must be formulaic, and everybody must be forced to comply with the system that she would want to ordain.

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Those who are not able to do so for whatever reason, including autism, ADHD, anxiety and other impediments to accessing the straitjacket of education that she seeks to impose, are to be treated with contempt.

What she is most certainly intent on doing is removing funding from the education system to support anyone who is neurodiverse.

The same would be true outside the education environment. Badenoch is certain that the world has become far too easy for employees. Sick leave for mental ill health is something that she clearly thinks society should not tolerate.

Quite openly, she has endorsed the view that those who suffer in this way should do so in isolation, without support, and address their issues themselves, which she correctly suggests is what happened in the past, whilst ignoring the disastrous consequences of that happening.

She is as adamant that diversity in all its forms will not be tolerated. Woe beside you if you are not male, straight, white, heterosexual, Christian and conservative.

Stray from that stereotype, and you will be considered to be deviant, and therefore outside acceptable society, and must be hidden from view. Trump‘s plan includes the explicit suggestion that women should be at home, pursuing childcare.

No one knows how the economics of that are meant to work, but as this has long been a Tory belief, it is now bound to be more explicitly stated. Meanwhile, every other person who might identify themselves as being in some form of minority needs to be as concerned.

So, where does Trump fit into all this? As Badenoch made clear in her very first questions addressed to Keir Starmer in the House of Commons this week, she wants the Prime Minister to invite Trump here so that he might address both Houses of Parliament in Westminster, no doubt using the opportunity to promote the very ideas with which she wishes to be associated.

I would rather strongly suspect that Trump has very little awareness of who Badenoch might be, but what is clear is that she sees herself as inextricably linked to his cause.

I suspect I do not need to explain where I stand on all these issues. What I do, however, hope is that the Scottish independence movement will notice all this.

What is more, they should note that the people of the USA rejected Harris this week because they thought that what she had to offer (which is close to what Labour has to offer here) was no better than the Trump alternative.

That means those who want an independent Scotland cannot now put forward the standard neoliberal lines that have been the SNP mantra for too long and hope to succeed.

A real alternative that meets the needs of real people is what is required now if Trump and Kemi Badenoch are to be beaten and neoliberal Labour is to be consigned to history. Is that movement up to that task?