WE have been collectively transfixed in horror and despair about what is happening across the pond. 

We are fearfully anticipating the assault on women's, LGBT, and minority rights which are about to befall an America which voted for a convicted felon, sexual predator, liar, and racist fearmonger who four years ago tried to overthrow the American government, and did so in the full knowledge of who he is and what he represents. 

The clouds have been gathering for a while, in the right-wing authoritarian governments which are taking power in many countries, from India, to Hungary, Turkey, Israel and more. 

With Trump's election in America the world feels like a very dark place. The oligarchs who have funded an entire eco system of right-wing media have won – at least for now – billionaires railing against the "elites." 

It is a salutary reminder that progress is not inevitable, and civil liberties and rights can never be taken for granted. The rights which our parents and grandparents fought for at immense personal cost to themselves cannot be taken for granted. 

As someone who spent much of the 1980s and 1990s campaigning for gay equality, I feel that intensely on a deeply personal level. 

A generation of American women will now have fewer rights than their mothers and grandmothers. The federal right to abortion has already gone, and it's only going to get worse. Instead of smashing the glass ceiling for women and electing the first female president Americans have replaced it with reinforced bullet proof glass and a serial sexual abuser. 

Commentators have spent a lot of time diagnosing what's wrong with Donald Trump, he's a malignant narcissist, a selfish and greedy ill-educated moron whose veins are full of chip fat and who is addicted to hate filled social media rants. But the truth is that what is wrong with Donald Trump is also what is wrong with America. 

What happens in America very often makes its way over here eventually and in the UK, we have the girning figure of Nigel Farage and his overtly racist supporters snapping at the heels of a Conservative party. 

Scotland is not immune, Farage's party has been courting support amongst the more rabidly right-wing British nationalist sections of anti-independence and anti-devolution sentiment in Scotland and may very well succeed in getting some MSPs elected to Holyrood at the next Scottish Parliamentary elections. 

This Sunday is Remembrance Sunday, a day when we are supposed to remember those who gave everything in the fight against fascism and tyranny, yet that day and its symbolism has been co-opted by modern iterations of the same right wing authoritarian nationalism which our forebears gave their lives to defeat. 

Nazi salutes are regularly to be seen on the far-right anti-immigration protests of the EDL and others, which all too often descend into atavistic violence. 

So much for no austerity under Labour 

Meanwhile, the Labour Government in Westminster continues with and intensifies the sidelining and neutralisation of the Scottish Parliament which began under the previous Conservative regime. 

Most UK Government departments are facing cuts to their budgets, the government plans to reduce day-to-day spending from 16.7% of GDP in 2023-24 to 16.0% in 2028-29, and plans to reduce public sector net investment from 2.5% of GDP in 2023-24 to 1.7% in 2028-29. 

The budget of the Department of Education will be reduced by £3.8 billion. Funds for nurses, doctors, and other hospital staff may be reduced by £8.8bn. The Home Office budget will be cut by £700 million. 

So much for no austerity under Labour. 

Yet despite these cuts to departments which have real responsibilities for the delivery of public services, Starmer's government has decided to boost the budget of the Scotland Office, which does not have any responsibility for the delivery of public services in Scotland, by £1.4bn over the next decade, representing a huge 14% rise in the Scotland Office's budget. 

In recent years the Scotland Office has morphed into a propaganda arm of the Westminster government in Scotland. You might have thought we already have the BBC for that sort of thing. 

Questions have been raised about how the spending increase will benefit the people of Scotland – with fears raised the money will be spent on “Union-flag-waving projects”. 

It is thought by many that this spending increase is not intended to benefit the people of Scotland, but rather its point is to benefit the political cause of the anti-independence Labour party and to bypass the Scottish Government. 

Greens co-leader Patrick Harvie said: "It's entirely unclear what this money is actually for, and I am sceptical that funding the Scotland Office actually benefits anyone in Scotland. 

“Any extra funding for public services or infrastructure should have been devolved to the Scottish Parliament, allowing us to invest it in our schools and NHS or to put it towards scrapping peak rail fares, rolling out free school meals for primary 6 and 7 pupils or mitigating the damage done by Labour's cruel decision to cut the winter fuel payment." 

‘Brass neck’ 

At today's First Minister's Questions, John Swinney said he was left feeling "perplexed" by the questions asked by the Scottish Tories. 

Patrician Tory MSP Edward Mountain demanded to know when the A9 road would be converted to dual carriageway between Perth and Inverness. 

The First Minister pointed out that the minority SNP government had been committed to dualling the road in 2007 but Labour, the Conservatives and the Lib Dems forced the money to be spent on the Edinburgh trams instead. 

He then asked which other projects the Tories would have liked to cancel, saying: "Now I'm a bit perplexed by what projects Mr Mountain doesn’t want us to have taken forward. Did he not want us to take forward the Queensferry Crossing? Did he not want us to take forward the Aberdeen Western Peripheral?" 

The First Minister also clashed with Tory MSP Meghan Gallacher who said that that a quarter of households with children had spent a year or more in temporary accommodation and claimed the SNP have "failed to turbo boost" housebuilding. 

The First Minister replied: "My goodness, the brass neck of some Conservative members in this Parliament. For 14 of the last 17 years, this Government has railed against the austerity inflicted upon us by Meghan Gallacher's Conservative government. 

"With all the damage that was done and we're all agreed that it was a disastrous period of austerity. But even despite all that, this Government has built more affordable houses per head of population than in England and in Wales despite the austerity of the Conservatives." 

We might have a Labour Government in Westminster now but there's still no hypocrisy like Tory hypocrisy. Some things will never change.