Wee Ginger by Paul Kavanagh W It’s raining Cuts and Dugs...

e’re now three months into a Scotish Tory Government

summer and we may safely predict that the ice age is just around the corner. So far our summer has been bleak, miserable, and there are precious few rays of sunshine in prospect.

The rubbish weather does at least have an excuse for not listening to the demands of the people, it being a set of meteorological phenomena; the Tories don’t have that excuse. They’re not a force of nature, they’re a force of farce.

Davie Cameron’s much touted Scotish respect agenda has died a death. It wasn’t even a slow and lingering death, the kind of death now being experienced by Scotish Unionism.

The “respect” agenda was already on life support aſter the No vote in the referendum. But the second it became clear that the Conservative party had secured an absolute majority on the back of votes elsewhere in the UK, the plug was pulled on it faster than Iain Duncan Smith could strip the income from a disabled person and push a wheelchair down a flight of stairs.

Of course, everyone always knew that the Tories didn’t really mean it - the Scotish respect agenda that is; no one ever doubted that they wanted to punish the poor, the vulnerable and the marginalised - so it’s not like it came as any surprise to discover that our new Tory government’s Scotish policy consists of trying to force us back into the shortbread tin before leaving us forgoten on the top shelf at the back of the cupboard.

The only possible exception was the BBC and the rest of the Scotish media which had

devoted itself to the principle of persuading Scotland that we really are beter together, with a government we don’t vote for and which has absolutely no interest in responding to the needs or desires of Scotland.

However even the Scottish media with its stupendous powers of self-delusion is struggling to avoid the realisation that when the Tories demonise and punish the poor, the vulnerable and the marginalised, they include Scotland in that category too.

58 August 2015

However, even the Scotish media, with its stupendous powers of self-delusion, is struggling to avoid the realisation that when the Tories demonise and punish the poor, the vulnerable and the marginalised, they include Scotland in that category, too. They hope to achieve this with acres of coverage on the Royal family, and the unwanted and unasked for naming of the new Glasgow hospital - paid for by you and me - the Queen Elizabeth. Although, if we’re going to call a gigantic hospital aſter a liner, surely we should have named it the Titanic, lots of people die in that one, too.

Mind you, the media is still trying to stick to the old “SNP bad” routine in the hope that no-one notices where the real evil is coming from. That didn’t cut much ice with half of Scotland’s voters during the General Election, and it’s working on even fewer now with every passing Osborne cut, with every contemptuous sneer in Westminster, and with every division lobby where Scotland’s MPs are voted down by MPs who don’t represent us.

Thanks to those votes from outside Scotland, our official voice in Parliament is that of David Fuddiddy-Mundelly, a man for whom democracy is worth litle more than a 19 points word score in Scrabble. He rejected every single amendment made