THE most notable feature of this Conservative government is the ease and fluency with which its senior members lie, distort the truth and deceive.

Indeed it's reasonable to wonder if the real reason Boris Johnson was so incoherent in his speech to the CBI earlier this week is because his lying tongue couldn't cope with the fact that when he embarked on his bizarre anecdote about a visit to Peppa Pig Land he was actually telling the truth for the first time in his mendacious career.

The rest of the Conservative government takes its cue from Johnson because if your boss has a relationship with the truth that is as distant as his speech to the CBI is from fluid and compelling oration, it sets up an expectation of mendacity that the self-serving underlings are only too eager to follow.

A case in point is the British Government's resident pantomime villain, who, in an attempt to score an SNPbad point, took time out from skinning puppies to make a fur coat in order to tell an outrageous lie about Scotland's efforts to assist a refugee crisis created in no small measure by the British Government's eagerness to invade faraway countries and to sell large quantities of weapons to tyrants, dictators and autocrats.

On Monday, Home Secretary Priti Patel told MPs in the Commons that "local authorities around the country and in particular in Scotland have not played their part in actually offering dispersal accommodation [to refugees and asylum seekers]". But then we should not expect the truth from a woman who shamelessly lies in order to further her own political agenda. In March this year, she made baseless and unfounded comments that migrants were pretending to be victims of modern slavery to win residence.

In fact, Scotland and the North of England take in disproportionately more refugees and asylum seekers than the predominantly Conservative-run local authorities in the South of England.

Official figures from Patel's own Home Office show that Scotland has taken in more people per head of its population for 14 of the last available 16 quarters since 2017 and, on average, it has taken in 5.4% more refugees and asylum seekers than would be expected from Scotland's share of the UK population. That's a greater rate than in Wales and Northern Ireland.

England receives 12.8% fewer than would be expected for its share of the UK population. Within England refugees and asylum seekers are most likely to be housed in the predominantly Labour-controlled local authorities of the North East.

This piece is an extract from today's REAL Scottish Politics newsletter, which is emailed out at 7pm every weekday with a round-up of the day's top stories and exclusive analysis from the Wee Ginger Dug.

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