Tag Archives: SNP

When Your Parents Read The Daily Mail

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The Daily Mail and its alternately salacious and harrumphing Sunday counterpart The Mail on Sunday are Orwell’s five minutes’ hate morphed and expanded into tabloid form.

They are to the brain what a mallet is, em, also to the brain – a big, sturdy mallet painted red, white and blue, with each side of its face carrying conservative slogans, ranging from ‘We should bally well help our own first’ to ‘Help our own? They should bally well help themselves, you know, like I had to, by God!’.

The people who read The Mail have been bashed with this hammer so many times they don’t even realise they’re concussed any more, nor that they’re in danger of their brains leaking out from their ears to be smushed underfoot by their own wingtips or fluffy tartan slippers. It’s a comfort to them, that hammer. If it ever stopped thudding they might have to think for themselves, or possibly even be forced to give a shit about someone out-with the green and pleasant lands of their own, nostalgia-flooded recollections.

I’m possibly judging readers of The Mail too harshly, especially since my own parents count among that much-maligned readership. My parents’ reason for buying the paper in the first place doesn’t appear to have been ideological, though long exposure to its contents inevitably has certainly helped to shape their ideology. Whether The Mail planted right-wing sentiments in the egalitarian gardens of their minds or merely provided the necessary nutrients to allow certain long-buried seeds to grow is a matter of conjecture. I do know that when I was a teenager ‘The Independent’ was the family newspaper. Then it was The Times. And now it’s The Mail. A sort of steady slide from left to right. What comes next? A subscription to Breitbart? A signed photo of Nigel Farage and Katie Hopkins?

Their reason for becoming Mail readers was simply this: price. They don’t like things like The Sun or The Star, and beyond those tub-thumping, shit-and-tit-covered dish-rags, it’s the cheapest newspaper option out there. Beautiful, right? Bargain bigotry.

Each time I visit them I never pass up the opportunity to offer withering comments on their choice of ‘news’ – remembering always to pronounce those inverted commas around the word ‘news’. My mum tends to get angry when I chastise her, claiming that her choice of newspaper in no way informs her outlook on life, even though for many years now her mouth has been filled only with false teeth and Daily Mail headlines.

On my last visit I gave her a guided tour of the edition she had sitting on her kitchen counter-top.

Page three was taken up by a full-page splash about Ewan McGregor’s divorce, complete with corny Star Wars headline. So far, so Express. Next up, the Royal Family. Whereas The Express is still hung up on the ghost of Princess Diana, the Mail is pursuing an endless, obsessive vendetta against Meghan and Harry.

Now, I’m no fan of The Royal Family – I’m  something of a republican in that regard – but the vitriol handed out to those two turns one’s stomach. Mail readers are a curious breed. Many of them like to get the bunting out, and buy cups and saucers emblazoned with the visage of old Lizzy Lizard. Most of them probably own a tonne-weight of commemorative coins encapsulating such epoch-defining moments as Prince Phillip scratching his arse with a gilded shoe-horn or the Queen staring witheringly at a foreign dignitary.

These people clearly harbour a desire to go back in time, not to the knees-up-Mother-Brown, Blitz-tinged days of the 40s and 50s, but way, way back – five or six hundred years back – to experience the sheer joy of living as serfs under the boot of some tyrannical, maid-murdering, family-fucking monarch of the true dynastic golden age. ‘Be a priv’lige to have you shit in my worfless dead mouff, m’am.’

Elsewhere in the ‘newspaper’ there was an attack on Devi Sridhar, Professor and Chair of Global Public Health at the University of Edinburgh, misrepresenting an interview she gave to the New York Times about the differences between how the Scottish and UK governments have handled the coronavirus outbreak, which they topped off with the disingenuous and inaccurate headline: SNP AIDE BLAMES ENGLISH FOR RISE IN CASES’.

Never one to miss a chance to stick it to Labour, there was a piece on Jack Straw’s son blacking up. And another one with a headline straight out of The Daily Mash: DID CORBYN’S MARXIST HENCHMAN GIVE BORIS AND CUMMINGS VIRUS? Good question. Once you’ve answered that, let’s find out if Jeremy Corbyn intercepted the Roswell aliens, stole the recipe for AIDS from them, and then used it to sink the Titanic.

I knew this next headline would be divisive, given that my mother and I have polar opposite positions on both the SNP and Independence: ‘£30M BILL FOR SWINNEY’S U-TURN ON EXAMS FIASCO’. I could almost hear my mother’s face tightening into a scowl as I read it aloud.

This was the story of the Scottish Government apologising for allowing geography and socio-economics to have a more impactful influence on post-COVID student grades than the measured predictions of their teachers. Not ideal, though can you imagine The Mail’s headlines in some alternate universe where the Scottish government hadn’t at least made a token effort to compensate for the teaching profession’s very human impulse to be nice to their kids during these troubling times: ‘EVERYONE’S A WINNER in SNP SCOTLAND: CLASS OF 2020 CERTIFICATES NOT WORTH THE PAPER THEY’RE WRITTEN ON.’

However, in the face of evidence and dissent the government was big enough to concede that its methods, reasonings and results had been flawed. They then issued a full and frank apology, and then promised to make the appeal process quick and pain-free. And literally free. Which they did.

I guess if you were being uncharitable you could characterise that as a U-Turn, but genuine political U-Turns usually come with less apologies (usually nearer zero) and a million per cent more obfuscation. So, again: disingenuous framing.

Mum, however, wouldn’t accept any defence of John Swinney or the SNP . ‘I’ve always hated Alex Salmond,’ she said. I just shook my head and kept flicking the pages.

The most unforgivable piece in that day’s hell-rag was probably the one carrying this head-line: ‘SO WHY IS BBC HANDING YOUR LICENCE FEE TO THIS SLEAZY PEDDLER OF PORNOGRAPHY?’

BBC The Social commissions online videos from contributors on a wide range of themes and topics, ranging from humour and health, to inspirational stories and educational vignettes. The fee for having a video accepted and featured isn’t huge.

One of these occasional contributors, Mandy Rose Jones, whose content is predominantly focused on mental health and body image, also sells pictures and videos of herself through an adult on-line portal called AdmireMe.

Both this site and the lady herself are unaffiliated with the BBC. Nevertheless, the poor girl was horse-whipped across two pages, as The Mail held her up as some sort of pervasive sexual deviant out to warp the nation’s kids. The article was nothing less than ritual humiliation, the modern equivalent of burning witches at the stake. A spurious, offensive diatribe. What this woman chooses to do online – as long as it’s legal – has no bearing whatsoever on the videos she produces for BBC The Social. And for all that it matters, which it doesn’t at all, no-one would’ve known about Mandy’s presence on AdmireMe had the Mail not chosen to turn her into collateral damage in their ongoing ideological war against the BBC.

The Mail is a hateful, gossip-filled tabloid that lends the illusion of a broadsheet. To make stupid people feel clever; and important. If this newspaper were a person it would be a dead donkey with the face of Katie Hopkins. It’s disingenuous, dirty, despicable, deceitful and disgusting. And I wish my parents wouldn’t buy it.

‘Come on, son,’ my mum said to me, with a proud and wounded look on her face. ‘What am I supposed to do? Buy The Daily Record?’

I didn’t know what to say to that, so I just closed the newspaper and walked away.

Quick Guide to Today’s Election Candidates

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I’ve compiled a quick run-down of the prime ministerial/first ministerial candidates and their policies to help you make an informed choice on this historic occasion.

Jeremy Corbyn – Labour

A true community activist, Jeremy Corbyn was a founding member of the IRA (Islington Radicals Association) and is still active in both the PLO (Peckham Leftist Organisation) and ISIS (Ilford Secularists Information Service). When he isn’t politicking, he likes to while away the evenings writing pamphlets, which are then posted through people’s doors by a collective of canvasers, each of whom wears a free-range beret and a badge that says ‘NELSON MANDELA – ALWAYS FREE AT THE POINT OF ENTRY’. The only payment they receive for doing this is a promise they’ll get to decide who’s first against the wall come the revolution. Some of Jeremy’s more popular pamphlets include ‘Nationalising Masturbation: The Hard Questions’, ‘Choosing the Right Balaclava for You’ and ‘Why Pantomimes are Fascist: Oh No They Aren’t, Oh Yes They Are’.

When Corbyn isn’t setting fivers alight just so that he can douse the Queen’s silently burning face with his cold piss, he likes to dress up as Stalin and masturbate gamely over ant colonies.

Five most striking policy proposals

  • A vow to give over all football grounds to Russian turnip farmers
  •  Make it law that the Royal Family must dress in shell-suits and smoke filterless cigarettes
  • New sessions of parliament must be opened with a six-hour long Irish jig with everyone dressed as leprechauns
  • Violent criminals to be given a cuddle and sent on their way
  • Death to the west

Jo Swinson – Liberal Democrats

Jo Swinson comes from a long line of Swins, a name that means ‘pig’ or ‘swine’ in Danish.  Swinson plans to change her name to Swindaughter on the eve of the election, to remind voters that she’s a woman, a brave woman, a strong woman, a real woman’s woman, womany all over, yep, she’s a woman alright, surprised she hasn’t mentioned it – and then a few minutes later she’ll change it to Jo Swintersex when someone in her campaign team points out how violently transphobic she’s being.

‘I’m a woman, my mother was a woman, and I really rather enjoyed both the Ghostbusters and the Oceans Eleven remake,’ Swinson announced at the Lib Dem party conference this year. ‘If I become prime minister, I’ll make sure that they do all-female remakes of Priscilla Queen of the Desert, Dunkirk and a new Cheech and Chong called Debbie and Samantha.’

It’s no secret that Jo Swinson’s life-long hatred of squirrels makes her the most dangerous candidate in this election. She’s already beaten one to death live on TV during Saturday Kitchen, afterwards vowing to eradicate squirrel-kind with a nuclear strike the first chance she gets.

Jo Swinson’s accent has been genetically modified to make her sound gradually less and less Scottish. Certainly no-one from Glasgow, or even her native Milngavnie, sounds like Swinson.  She used to sound exactly like Paul Coia, but her accent was experimented on in a hail of screams and lightning, Frankenstein style, until it died and came back as a zombie, except it’s pronounced ‘zoahowambee’ now for some fucking reason.

Five most striking policy proposals

  • The hateful, racist, transphobic US TV series Friends to be banned
  • All citizens must kill at least six squirrels a month, and prove it or they die
  • The adoption of all Tory policies
  • Earth to be re-named Her-th
  • Clitoris to be re-named Clito-her

Boris Johnson – Conservatives

Boris Johnson lives in a fridge, and likes to kill poor people. He’s really rather fond of the ‘working class’, but only in this sentence:  ‘Tory policies to kill the poor are working! Class!’ When he isn’t shuffling around like a recently-divorced Dulux dog that’s been shoved inside an un-ironed suit, he’s riding his bike around London with all the grace and poise of Officer Doofy fucking a vacuum cleaner.

Look closely as Boris is out on the campaign trail and you’ll notice that his arms are robotic (remotely controlled by a hidden Michael Gove), and his real arms are secured behind his back with cable tie. This is to stop Boris from trying to fuck every married woman to whom he’s introduced, and to prevent him from giving the fingers to poor people.

Boris taught himself to read using old World War 2-era boys’ comics with names like ‘Adventurous Rascals’ and ‘Cor Blimey, the Gerrys Nicked Me Spyglass’, which is why he still says things like ‘bother’, ‘gosh’, ‘blimey’, ‘Whizzo’ and ‘black people are genetically inferior’. Both he and his dad like to write shite spy thrillers about floppy-haired fat cunts called Boris saving the world from the insidious evil of people who aren’t white, English, upper-class, floppy-haired fat cunts called Boris.

At university, Boris Johnson introduced David Cameron to the pig whose head he would later f***.

Former leader of the Scottish Conservatives Ruth Davidson has announced that she will go skinny dipping in Loch Ness if the SNP gain 50 seats in this election. Boris has admitted that’s the one thing he probably couldn’t wank to.

Five most striking policy proposals

  • Top up the winter fuel allowance for the elderly by giving them homeless people to burn
  • Boris to be given a pass from the rigours of actual leadership so he can just make spoof videos all day
  • All new tower blocks to be doused in paraffin and made of cardboard
  • Questions to be made illegal
  • The NHS to be sold to Saudi Arabia as a weapon

Nigel Farage – Brexit Party

The Brexit Party’s party political broadcast this year was just an old man in a British-flag-patterned suit and top hat standing on a cliff-top angrily kicking Rogan Joshs into the sea, as Nigel Farage glared menacingly on necking a pint of Belhaven Best.

Nigel used to be in charge of UKIP, which has now been disassembled and put into storage in a warehouse just outside Kent, occasionally checked on by people called Dick Brayne and Pat Mountain, who sound like they were invented by the Viz Letter’s Page.

When Nigel isn’t peddling right-wing, racist propaganda, lying to the working classes and feathering his own nest, he likes to peddle right-wing, racist propaganda, deceive the working classes and feather his own nest. He’s going to be on next year’s Strictly Come Dancing.

Five most striking policy proposals

  • Something, something, something racist
  • [gulps down a pint of Belhaven]
  • Those bloody eastern Europeans! [shakes fist]
  • I’m just like you, salt of the earth, I am [eats caviar from a £50 note]
  • Give the Queen a knighthood

Nicola Sturgeon – SNP

Nicola Sturgeon is irreplaceable. Literally. The SNP can only be helmed by people with fish, or fish-related, names, and until a prospective leadership candidate comes along called Johnny Halibut or Vicky Basking-Clark, they’re going to have to keep Nicola extra safe.

Nicola Sturgeon has infuriated rivals by continuing to answer questions put to her directly without obfuscation or deceit, something that has [Woah, woah, woah. This is supposed to be a ridiculous little article that mocks each of the parties equally. Your bias is showing a little here – Ed] [Em, I don’t have an editor. It’s just me. I write this website myself.] [Then who the fuck am I? Am I just a guy called Ed? – Ed] [I don’t know, man.] [What do you mean you don’t know? If I don’t actually exist then it must be you who’s typing these words I’m saying right now, right? – Ed] [You don’t have to keep signing off as Ed now that we’ve established you don’t actually exist] [I’ll bloody well do what I like! Anyway, stop obfuscating. Why are you giving the SNP and Nicola Sturgeon an easy ride here? It’s the measure of a good satirist that they can skew even their own heroes and preferences, you know – Frank] [I’m not a satirist though. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I tend to make lots of easy jokes about knobs and bodily fluids and things. And Frank? Really?] [Yeah, since I’m not Ed I figured I could be whoever I liked – Gandalf] [This is getting ridiculous.] [Answer the question! Why are you giving the SNP an easy ride? – Fozzy Bear] [Because the SNP is the party with the fairest and most progressive policies, and represents the best hope for Scotland, and Nicola Sturgeon is a decent, measured, intelligent, capable and consummate politician who actually seems to give a fuck about what she says and what she does] [….That’s not very funny, is it? – An elk called Richard] [No, I suppose it isn’t]

Happy voting, comrades.

Scotland’s Smacking Ban: a Hit?

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‘Smacking’ sounds really nice, doesn’t it? The word, I mean. If you’re hungry for a snack, your lips might smack; if your gran comes to visit she might ask you to pucker up and give her a big old smacker on the kisser. Onomatopeiacally, a smack is rather like a crack, but much less forceful: sharper, cleaner, kinder.

It’s the sort of sound that makes you nostalgic for the good old days, when men were men, women were women, and botties were smacked. By golly we miss those halcyon, smoke-hazed days, before the cultural assassins in the Stalinist SNP tried to rob us of our right to smack: a right that is as sacred to us Scots as is the right to bear arms to the Americans, by God! And we will fight to defend that right!

I’ll tell you what we’ll do. We’ll organise a protest outside the Scottish parliament: six-thousand angry parents and their six-thousand passive, blank-faced children. We’ll march them up to the front door, whip their trousers down, bend them over our knees and show Nicola Sturgeon that we mean business by unveiling the world’s biggest, six-hour-long, six-thousand-bum synchronised arse-smacking, the sound of which will fill the air like revolutionary gun-fire! Smack, smack, smack! Read our bums, Nicola! We won’t be turning the other cheek on this one. Well… we will be, as a matter of fact, but only so we can bloody well smack it, too!

…Language is a funny old thing, isn’t it? Time and again we bend and smash and smush and twist our words as though they were putty and paste, making paper machier towers that we let ourselves believe are permanent, solid, unbreakable. We build words around us like ramparts, and take up sniper positions behind them; we try on words like we’re shopping for clothes, seeking out dazzling combinations that accentuate our wealth, power, sex appeal, or contrition – does my guilt look thinner in this sentence? – or else use them to reinvent ourselves entirely; sometimes we use words as shields to protect us from the force of the truth: the truth of who we are and what we do: enemy combatant; extraordinary rendition; my honourable friend; friendly fire; constructive dismissal; it’s not you it’s me; McDonalds’ Happy Meal.

What I’m trying to say is that ‘smacking’ isn’t really smacking, you see: it’s hitting. Why don’t you try saying that instead? ‘Smacking’ is hitting a small, defenceless child, and that’s true regardless of the strength of the hit, or whether the point of impact is a bottie, a thigh, an arm, a face or a chest.

If you’re defending what you perceive as your universal human right to smack a child, then at least be honest about it. Rip the mask from the face of that word to reveal its true identity, and lay bare your own sub-Lecter-ish lust for pain and power. Spell out your intentions both to yourself and to the world at large. Shout it from the rooftops: ‘I demand the right to hit and inflict pain on the fruits of my loin without consequence or interference, whenever I see fit and however spurious the reason.’

In terms of self-delusion there’s very little difference between ‘I don’t beat my children, for goodness sake, I just give them a light corrective smack’ and ‘I’m not an alcoholic, for goodness sake, I wait until at least lunchtime before having my first drink!’

‘Yea, yea, yeah, you ponce!’ you might cry. ‘But I got smacked, and it never did me any harm!’

Ah, that familiar cry, countered so many times by the now-equally familiar cry, ‘Yes it did, because you believe that it’s okay to hit children.’ I’ve noticed that the most ardent supporters of ‘smacking’ are usually those upon whose faces you can see the tragic consequences of a life lived through shortcuts, a life lived in a world of permanent present tense: crumbling teeth; unkempt hair; blotched and bloodshot eyes that reveal a map of impulse forever left unchecked.

Probably best to eschew parenting advice from someone who’s lazy and blinkered enough to hit first and ask questions later.

Plus, if smacking is your go-to punishment of choice, how do you punish your child for hitting somebody? By hitting them? What message does that send? Especially since they may be hitting other people precisely because you’ve taught them that hitting is permissible.

‘But how else will children learn right from wrong?’

Take violence from our toolbox, and we’re powerless! It’s true. That’s why we still beat children in schools, and our boss is legally entitled to smash us in the face with a tyre iron. That’s why when the judge is about to pronounce sentence in the courtroom he might say something like: ‘The defendant has been found guilty on all counts of his robbery charges. Now bring him here so I can kick the fuck out of him.’

I can understand the impulse to hit. Of course I can, I’m a human being, and I live in a world that contains Piers Morgan. I can even understand the impulse to hit a child. No creature on earth can inspire such anger, and scream-inducing helplessness and frustration as your own child. But I would never – and could never – do it. I don’t think I could ever look my kids in the eye again, and I’d feel like an irredeemable failure as a father.

In no other sphere of life do we condone hitting as a solution. Even savagely violent, hopelessly recidivistic killers are spared violence as a behaviour modification tool. Looking for another reason not to hit your child? Let reason itself be your reason. Behold the maxim below that’s been floating around cyberspace in meme form for quite some time now:

When our eldest son, Jack, approached the age of reason, we started using a sticker-based system that recognised, rewarded and re-inforced good behaviour, and helped us circumnavigate bad behaviour. It wasn’t a perfect system, granted, but it seemed to achieve its aims without causing major psychological damage. I remember once Jack was trying to pilfer a biscuit before bedtime; he had a hand inside the bag with a biscuit held between his fingers in a vice-like pincer grip. When I calmly advised that his current course of action would result in the immediate loss of a sticker, he couldn’t have dropped that biscuit any quicker if I’d been an armed New York cop shouting ‘Freeze, dirtbag!’

On a few occasions, thanks to the child’s method of learning and evolving through mimicry, he put on his best faux-cross-face and told me he was going to take a sticker away from ME.

Replay that scene again, mimicry and all, but this time imagine that I’d hit him.

Plus, yah boo and sucks to the ‘How do you teach young kids not to touch hot surfaces without even a gentle smack?’ Because the answer is: ‘Very easily.’ You watch them like a hawk. You make yourself responsible for not exposing them to any danger. And if you do see your kid about to touch something dangerous, a loud warning shout is an effective deterrent (provided you aren’t the sort of person who shouts all the time, thereby lessening the impact).

‘Kids will run wild if you don’t show them who’s boss.’

It’s hard to believe that we once allowed teachers to belt our children up and down the schoolyard, making our own flesh-and-blood handy scapegoats for everything wrong in a teacher’s life from sexual frustration to really bad hangovers.

But there are still those who would give a wildly disingenuous defence of smacking, both private and corporal. They’ll tell you that there’s a direct correlation between the ban on corporal punishment, and a decline of discipline, order and respect in today’s society. That somehow if we were to take the next logical step and ban smacking entirely then discipline would cease to exist. Instead of there being negative consequences for misbehaviour, kids would instead be disproportionately rewarded for their breaches: “Ah, I see you’ve thrown a television through the window of the old folks’ home, Timmy. What would you say to a lovely new Playstation 4, slugger?” (PS: If anyone should be beaten for their transgressions, it should be me for splitting an infinitive in the previous sentence)

You want to be disingenuous? I can be disingenuous too. My friends, there’s a direct link between corporal punishment and child beatings, and the advent of both world wars. Violence begets violence, you see.

The children you see or hear about running amok, showing disrespect or engaging in violent acts (which never happened in ‘your’ day, oh no, bloody utopia, so it was) are more likely to come from homes where violence, abuse and/or neglect are the norm. They’re certainly more likely to come from an environment characterised by deprivation or poverty. So the next time you feel moved to trot out the old, ‘All these kids need is a bloody smack’, remember that it’s likely a smack, or a complete absence of care or touch, that’s made them the way they are in the first place.

We can’t live in the past. We have to move forward. Learn from our mistakes. As has become abundantly clear in recent months and years, there are many among us content to hark back to the good old days, which weren’t really all that good anyway. They wish they still lived in a world where they could be thirty-thousand feet in the air in an aeroplane piloted by a shit-faced captain, knocking back whiskeys, maniacally chain-smoking, free to punch their child in the face should they have the temerity to cough, and occasionally stopping to hurl sexually-charged racial abuse at one of the stewardesses: ‘Phwoar, you’re alright for a darkie, sweetheart!’

The last strike

‘Tradition’ is a huge sticking point. A lot of people who decry the loss of smacking as a correctional tool cite the influence of their parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, a long line of smackers reaching back to the dark ages. It’s hard to advocate against something that’s so established in your family’s history. If you turn against it, then that means that you were wrong for hitting your children, or that your parents were wrong for hitting you. That’s a hard thing to admit.

Does it mean that as a smackee/smacker you were abused/an abuser? No, most probably. Or not necessarily. Although smacking is wrong, and proven to point towards serious negative outcomes, it was once the prevailing parental philosophy. Going forwards, why don’t we just say: ‘My parents hit me, I hit my kids, and I’m sorry about that, but we genuinely thought it was the right thing to do. We did it because that’s how we were taught to show love and bestow discipline. I’m not going to feel too bad or guilty about that now. It happened. It’s done. But from this point forth, no more. Just like when we used to smoke in the house with our kids, or put whisky in our babies’ bottles, we know better now. And we can do better.’

I don’t think the smacking ban has a realistic chance of being properly policed or enforced, but it might just open up the issue to public scrutiny – as it’s doing right now – and perhaps dissuade parents from adding smacking to their parental repertoire. The ban, however symbolic its application, will at least amplify the message, loud and clear, that we don’t live in that world anymore.

General Election 2017: Use your vote, but use it wisely

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In the run-up to the council elections earlier this year Ruth Davidson posed on a mobility scooter, presumably as part of her campaign to raise awareness about how underdeveloped the Tory party’s sense of irony is. Really, Ruth? That’s like Thatcher trying to win over the working class by posing for the 1985 Socialist Worker’s calendar, lounging across a pit entrance, and naked except for a miner’s helmet and a puff of coal-dust on each cheek.

The Tory party – in both Westminster and Holyrood – is working hard to channel the spirit of an apparently remorseful abusive partner, swearing with all of its might that ‘this time things will be different’.  In the grip of delusional desperation in Scotland – and owing to a sense of sinister, Voldermortian assurance in England – the Tories are busy positioning themselves as the party of the disabled, the disenfranchised, the poor, the NHS, the working man. ‘I’ve changed, honestly I have, you’ll see, I love you, I don’t want to lose you. I promise that this time I won’t beat the absolute fuck out of you, and then cheat on you with the posh bit of stuff up the street.’

I can understand why the guy with the monocle from Monopoly would vote Conservative, but why has the party enjoyed such an upsurge in popularity among the working class? Why are people who rely upon the NHS, a healthy welfare state and a large swathe of well-funded, publicly-run services (particularly in the care sector) essentially voting for their own destruction by embracing a party that is, at root, ideologically opposed to all of these things?

Our predominantly right-wing media is partly responsible for this state of affairs, of course, that steady drip-feed of lies, hysteria and manipulation masquerading as news and comment. Look on in envy, Kaiser Soze, because yours is no longer the greatest trick ever pulled, son: tabloid newspapers are owned by billionaires and staffed by middle-class urban professionals, but somehow the working class is convinced that they speak for them. This same mentality runs rampant in America, as evidenced by its people hailing a heartless, ruthless billionaire, who built his billions on the broken backs of millions, as a man of the people (It’s not even clear that Donald Trump is a person, much less a man).

It also seems to me that the thunderous orchestra of social and political issues that makes up the soundtrack to our dizzyingly complex and hectic lives has been reduced to one single, deafening scream: BLOODY FOREIGNERS! “I don’t want these bloody Poles and P***s using our bloody NHS!” Well, take heart, my frightened, reactionary friend. You keep voting like this and the NHS won’t exist anyway. Who knows, maybe that’s been the agenda/evil plan all along.

As a little aside, it also amazes me that most of the British nationalists and unionists I’ve encountered – the ones with streaks of racism in them so prominent they’re actually visible from space – have also been, almost unfailingly, great admirers of the Queen.

“LONG LIVE THE QUEEN!” “FOR QUEEN AND COUNTRY!” “I BLOODY LOVE THAT WOMAN!” Ah, a violent, semi-literate alcoholic skinhead with a hair-trigger temper. I’m sure the Queen will be inviting you round to the palace for tea and cucumber sandwiches any day now. Again, she’s a billionaire who sits on a throne and wears a crown. I don’t know what part of that makes Davey from Possil imagine that their love and respect is somehow mutual. The Queen probably wouldn’t piss on most of us if we were on fire.

Our charred corpses, on the other hand…

“Well,” people in Scotland might say, “I need to vote Tory to keep that wee dwarf Sturgeon out. She only cares about making Scotland independent!”

It seems a bit churlish to lambast the leader of what is ultimately the ‘We’re Committed to this Very Specific Thing’ Party for being committed to a very specific thing. Spoiler alert: yes, the SNP is pretty keen on Scottish independence, primarily because it’s our last, best hope to conduct and manage our affairs in line with our political, economic and social needs and aspirations. But the SNP isn’t a one-trick pony. Its manifesto also embraces civicism with a heavy smattering of socialism, something most people would know if they ever had occasion to hear Nicola Sturgeon talk without some arsehole shouting ‘BUT WHAT ABOUT INDEPENDENCE, DWARF?!’ at her every three seconds (I don’t think poor Nicola finish her breakfast without somebody asking her if she intends to grant self-determination to her cornflakes).

Do you really want to vote for Theresa May: a wobble-voiced Thatcher-lite who looks like she’s trying to regurgitate an albatross each time she laughs? Or Ruth Davidson, a passionless politician with the soul of a middle-manager?

The old saying goes that the longer we live the more right-wing our views become: we start off as idealists, and crusaders for justice, but evolve into bitter, jaded cynics as we come to the painful realisation that the world is a great, immutable sink-hole of unfairness, indifference and cruelty (In fact, wait, isn’t that actually a line from the Tory manifesto?).

So if a leftist is capable of transitioning from left to right, then what the hell kind of moral journey does a Tory undertake as he or she advances into their twilight years? How much more ‘right’ can ‘right’ get?

Do you really want to find out?

England: vote for Corbyn, come what May.

Scotland: Be Ruthless.

**Hey, wait a minute. It’s finished? But what about Scottish Labour? Well, exactly.