FEW if any voters' tears will be shed for David Coburn, Ukip’s sole elected representative in Scotland, who is not standing again in the European elections and whose constant blustering, embarrassing and ridiculous assertions won him no friends in Brussels or Edinburgh.
However there are a host of wannabe politicians vying to succeed to his tarnished crown as the unfunny court jester of Scottish politics.
The choice is hard but my own nomination would presently go to one Otto Inglis, number three on the Ukip list, whose blogs on the Conservative Woman website include the assertion that the teaching of politics, sociology or social work in our world-beating universities is a “life support system for Marxist evil”.
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We live, alas, in an age of extremism but the reaction to that should always be to up our dependence on rationality and inclusion. Those are the best building blocks for a better future.
Rationality and inclusion were the hallmarks of the First Minister’s statement to the Scottish Parliament last Wednesday but I wish I could say that her approach was mirrored by that of the other party leaders.
Certainly Patrick Harvie and Allison Johnston of the Greens made measured contributions, but Willie Rennie was as angry and shrill as ever whilst Richard Leonard seemed to have learnt nothing from his party’s deep self-inflicted wounds when part of the Better Together campaign.
Inevitably, though, it was Jackson Carlaw, with Adam Tompkins acting as cheerleader, who took the prize for irrationally and arrogant exclusion.
Tompkins went so far as to shout “See you in court” when the First Minster was speaking about the proposed Referendum Bill, which is entirely within the competence of the Parliament.
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She had actually been at pains to indicate that the bill could not deliver an independence referendum without a Section 30 order, agreed by both Parliaments, but Tompkins (in his other day job a Professor of Constitutional Law) actually seemed to be delighted by the idea of the UK Government using the London courts to force their will on a Scottish Parliament in which he sits and on the Scottish people he is elected to represent.
His rhetoric was echoed by other Tory MSPs, who simply cannot break out of their tribal contempt for Scottish self-determination, and those who espouse it.
That approach isn’t exclusively about Scotland of course. The Tories always oppose change – that is why they are called “conservatives”.
And as champions of the chaos caused by a Parliament and a political system decaying under the weight of irrelevant flummery masquerading as tradition, they are particularly opposed to independent modernity in constitutions and countries.
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Nation after nation, seeking to establish a place in the world, has come up against that Tory passionate adherence to the status quo. The language of the party has also often matched their deeds – they once called Ghandi a “malignant subversive fanatic” – up to and including their rhetoric about our Irish neighbours during the endless Brexit process.
But equally consistently the Tory party nearly always – eventually – changes its mind and ends up embracing change and accepting the inevitably of self-rule and equality amongst the nations.
WE in the Scottish Parliament should know that better than most. Tompkins proved the point in another of his interventions because when the First Minister announced the setting up of a Citizens’ Assembly, he muttered: “We already have one – it is this Parliament.”
Apart from illustrating that he doesn’t understand what a Citizens’ Assembly actually is, the remark could be seen as positive, for it is a long way removed from the language of the vehement campaign against the establishment of a Scottish Parliament that the Tories waged during the dark days of Thatcherism.
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This was a campaign driven forward in its final kamikaze stage during the 1997 referendum by self-styled “blue trots” such as Brian Monteith who is now the lead Brexit Party candidate in the north-east of England.
Monteith is an interesting exemplar. An acolyte of Michael Forsyth, the most divisively extreme Tory ever to hold office in Scotland, his Think Twice NO NO campaign against devolution got nowhere, so no sooner had the democratic dust settled he got himself elected to the very institution he didn’t want to happen.
But unlike others who adapted, he couldn’t. He got the heave from the Conservative group in the Scottish Parliament for briefing against their then leader, the late and much respected David McLetchie and subsequently flounced out of Scottish electoral politics condemning the “tide of treacly collectivism” he thought was its hallmark.
His colleagues stayed and went with the flow, but didn’t change their very reactionary spots. That means they were, and still are, unable to move with the tide not of collectivism but progress, seeking out the best way for Scotland to respond to changes in the world around them.
So their current hysterical condemnation of all the things that the First Minister announced this week – a referendums bill to ensure that when we do get a Section 30 order we are ready to move to a vote, cross-party engagement (which needs to include them) to exchange ideas and listen to other views on how our current constitutional crisis can be resolved, and a Citizens’ Assembly which is a means of uniting Scotland and avoiding the terrible divisions that have arisen during Brexit – is simply a further sign of a traditional Tory inability to embrace progress and contribute to it constructively.
Faced with that attitude all the rest of us can do is make sure that the door is left open for them to participate when they wish.
Of course they could short circuit the whole wearisome process by doing what most politicians do; listen, think, judge by the needs of the people they serve and then embrace the chance to improve the lot of their constituents and their country.
Just as the First Minister and our party have been doing all along.
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