Losers unite at the end of days

Scottish Tories made some good calls on gender, hate crime, even tax - so why does no one vote for them?

You wondered why the Tories bothered with their Scottish campaign launch. It barely referred to UK election issues, got precious little coverage in the media (betting scandals aside) and looked less like a “winning team” than a brace of losers.

There was Rishi Sunak, about to make history by leading the Conservative Party to its worst election defeat in over a  century, sitting next to Douglas Ross who’s already made history by becoming the first leader of a political party to resign before polling day.   

But they didn’t let it show.  Sunak announced that this election could put independence “to bed”, presumably tucked in with a nice cup of cocoa.  Ross rabbited on about the SNP’s “obsession” with independence ignoring the fact that only the Tories seem obsessed with it right now.  Even the SNP seems to have moved on.

The press were obsessed with the Prime Minister’s betting scandal and why he hadn’t suspended members of his inside team who made bets on the date of the general election election. He now has - suspending two of the errant election candidates. Unfortunately, this action is too late to do Sunak or the Conservative Party any good. He had said he was awaiting the result of the Gambling Commission’s investigation, before “booting” them wrong-doers out of the Conservative Party.  Like Mr Ross, who booted himself out of the Scottish Tory leadership, not for placing bets, but for booting aside the local candidate for the Aberdeenshire North parliamentary seat, David Duguid.

That new seat is technically a safe one for the Tories, which is why Douglas Ross was so eager to bag it. But it’s a moot point whether any Tory seat in Scotland is safe right now after this disastrous campaign.  The Tories are liable to lose half of their six seats on July 4th, according to most polls, and are running at 14% - their lowest score ever. Indeed some recent polls suggested that the Tories could be wiped out in Scorland. What a fitting end to David Ross’s leadership that would be.

It’ll take more than a penny off tax to reverse that poll slide. The Tories main retail offer in their manifesto, apart from more police and fewer waiting lists, was a penny off the “intermediate” rate, supposedly worth £171. I’m not  sure that this modest giveaway is going to cut through to voters. No one really understands the new multilayered Scottish tax bands anyway.  It doesn’t address the real scandal, which is that one in five Scots, including many police officers and teachers, will soon be dragged into paying a higher rate of tax this year, up from one in eight in 2019.

    However, as I argued in my Times column this week, the Scottish Conservatives are at probably making the right noises on tax. It’s no accident that Kate Forbes, the SNP deputy first minister, has said that Humza Yousaf’s new tax bands are “under review”. In reality, SNP tax policy hasn’t been so much punitive as pointless. Yousaf’s much-lauded new advanced rate and other top tax increases will yield all of £80 million — enough to run the Scottish NHS for less than three days. What Scotland needs is more high earners, not fewer, so that they can deliver more tax revenue for public services.

And it’s not just on tax that the Tories have made the right calls in Scotland. JK Rowling may not be a natural Tory voter, but she certainly isn’t going to back the SNP in this election, or the Liberal Democrats — and especially not Scottish Labour, who she says has betrayed women. Anas Sarwar’s MSPs voted for the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill even more enthusiastically than the SNP, who at least suffered a parliamentary rebellion led by “gender-critical” MSPs.

Sarwar has yet to atone for his capitulation to trans ideology. The party’s manifesto still calls for “reform” of gender laws and, unlike the UK Labour manifesto, actually drops any requirement for a diagnosis of gender dysphoria before teenagers can change legal sex. This looks like Self-ID 2.0.

It was the “nasty” Tories who halted the misogynistic GRR Bill in its tracks by deploying Section 35 of the Scotland Act. They were accused by Nicola Sturgeon of a “full-frontal attack” on devolution. That was before we learned that male sex offenders were being placed in women’s prisons. That must be worth a few votes at least from all those “Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht” as the best-selling gender-critical book calls them. Who else is there to vote for? Not the Greens.

The Tories, to give them credit, were also leading critics of the Hate Crime Act and earlier illiberal measures like the infamous “named person” scheme before it fell foul of the European Convention on Human Rights. They opposed the disastrous deposit return schemeon behalf of small businesses. The Scottish Tories seem to be the only ones who see the economic (and safety) value of improving roads like the A9 and A96. They are actually right about that.

It has been left to the Tories to consistently defend Scotland’s oil and gas industry and the 100,000 jobs that the GMB union and Aberdeen & Grampian Chamber of Commerce now say are at imminent risk from Labour’s ban on drilling — a ban that John Swinney appears to support, according to his condemnation of the UK government’s latest licensing round. Actually, it is impossible to make sense of the SNP’s energy policy right now since they face both ways. Swinney says Sunak’s round of drilling licenses amounts to “climate denial”, while Forbes insists that they have never opposed new developments in the North Sea.

Indeed, if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Ms Forbes seems to be dressing increasingly to the right — on issues from Self-ID to the ban on wood-burning stoves. Maybe she knows something the rest of her party don’t: that Scotland is a small “c” conservative country that happens to have recently been governed by self-styled “progressives”.

Indeed, it sometimes seems as if the only thing preventing Scottish voters, fed up with heat pumps and trans dogma, from voting Conservative is the party name and its “English party” image and reputation. The former deputy leader, Murdo Fraser, was right back in 2011 when he said the Tory brand is damaged beyond repair in Scotland.  This general election is turning into an extinction level event for the UK Conservative Party. Perhaps this is the moment for a new party of the centre right to rise from the ashes..