A Deadly Kind of Cowardice

Journalist Robert Somynne reflects on the derision heaped on the Tories in Scotland and whether this is an effective tactic against Conservative propaganda.

“The idea of deriding the Banchory Bunker misses the point. This isn’t really about the realities of what’s going on on the ground, this is about them presenting themselves to a section of Scotland they feel they can get, this is about creating symbolism – an image of them being the ones that can protect the status quo…”

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  1. MBC says:

    Interesting view. The divisions between urban and rural Scotland seeming stark. However there is one part of rural Scotland that has never really bought into Toryism, and that’s the western isles and west Highlands where the Tories have always been synonymous with landlordism and the Clearances. Politicisation in the 19th century by the Land League has seen to that. Yet the Lowland rural areas like the SW, East Lothian, Berwickshire and the NE have had their own forms of rural poverty inflicted by Tories but politicisation didn’t really get off the ground there to the same extent.

    I don’t laugh off the Tory revival. It is real. They are throwing a whole lot of money at it in carefully stage managed campaigns. A lot of money, and it is working. The party of opportunity and aspiration. We are for you who want to get on. All lies, all phoney, but it is getting through to the gullible barely managing people.

    1. Willie says:

      The gullible barely managing people MBC are their own worst enemy MBC. As someone who has stood on the streets the bitter resentment that infests Tory sentiment finds a home in some of these people.

      England is not a land entirely comprising of toffs but it has a sizeable majority of people who eschew the me, myself, and I policy so extant in English psyche. As long as their poverty is less than their neighbours poverty, then they are satisfied.

      Victorian poverty will be back again and the English electorate will see to that. And Jock will just have to those it too, the whinging subsidy git that he is.

      But as you say MBC we have some of these people here in Scotland and when they vote Conservative, every vote beyond the paltry figures that they previously received, will be cast as a success by the Westminster government, and be used to drive Scotland down the Northern Ireland route.

      Ruth Davidson and her ilk in Westminster will see to that and direct rule through a reversion of powers will see to that.

  2. MBC says:

    The odd thing is that historically there was a radical tradition in the SW: think Burns, think Hugh MacDiarmid. And it was in East Lothian and Berwickshire that the first stirrings of a farm workers union began in the late 19th century. The 19th century feeing system that evolved in the earlier part of the 19th century was the product of the defiance of the agricultural worker against the commercial farmer and landowners, proving they could only be bought one year or two at a time, but never permanently, and never owned.

    All vestiges of that tradition seem to have gone, as people migrated to the cities in the 20th century to find better opportunities rather than remain to fight their oppressors. My ancestors were amongst them. Their oppressors remained, firm in the saddle, in control of local politics.

    I learned this politics of defiance from my grandfather as he no doubt learned it from his Berwickshire and East Lothian forebears. ‘Wha daes he think he is? Struttin aboot like Lord Jooky Baccloo?’ (Duke of Buccleuch).

    Jooky Baccloo was well identified as a hate figure amongst the rural poor.

    In migration from England over the last 30-40 years has also weakened the anti-Tory vote.

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