As expected, Nigel Farage promoted his two most recent Tory defectors to plum positions in his party. It’s all part of the grand delusion, says Herald columnist Kevin McKenna

The counterfeit politics of the UK’s main parties was evident once more as UK Reform unveiled their new top team. Nigel Farage appointed Robert Jenrick as the party’s ‘shadow chancellor’ and Suella Braverman as their Education minister in waiting. If any proof was still needed Reform are playing an elaborate confidence trick on those working-class voters it purports to speak for, the promotion of this pair of opportunists has just provided it.

Certainly, you can’t condemn Mr Farage for duping his supporters. In Scotland, the SNP have been doing it successfully for ten years or so. Sir Keir Starmer and Labour’s Inch-High Private Eye detective agency came to power on the delusion that they’re left-wing. To paraphrase the influential American political savant, Buddy the Elf, the British Prime Minister “sits on a throne of lies”.

Since 2015, we’ve never been far away from the next incoming declaration of intent about independence by the SNP. There have been so many that you’re able to create a mosaic of all the breathless headings. On several occasions spanning a period of five years we’ve been told to ‘Get Ready for IndyRef 2’. Another standard is ‘Sturgeon says IndyRef2 will beat at heart of the campaign’. My favourite was ‘Snap Indyref likely next autumn’ according to a former SNP minister in August, 2020.

‘Secret Scotland’ fears intensify as MSPs consider FOI reform

Best Scottish Premier side in Scotland helped Motherwell shimmy again

I believe Anas Sarwar is 100% right to call on Starmer to resign

A national women's movement could hit the hateful SNP hard

I’m told that one of the first tasks hopefuls are asked to complete during the SNP’s candidate recruitment process is to pen a snappy slogan of intent about independence. That way, the party always has a handy pile of them for the purpose of duping their perma-gullible supporters. These are the same ones who think that their baby-box folds out into a bijou, split-level flat conversion that will ease the housing crisis in disadvantaged neighbourhoods. 

Yet, you have to hand it to Nigel Farage. What he’s managed to do eclipses even the SNP’s grand deception. He’s managed to convince large numbers of working-class voters that he’s the very man for them and that he and his multi-millionaire city-boys all link hands and sing The Internationale when they’re having their policy lunches down the Dog and Duck on the Old Kent Road.

Mr Jenrick and Ms Braverman must be pinching themselves. There they were, wondering if they’d ever again feel the soft leather interior of a ministerial Jaguar as the Tories continued their tailspin into electoral oblivion. Now here they are perusing the soft furnishings catalogues in readiness for their flits into the grace-and-favour homes of the UK’s governing top-brass.

They’ve secured their promotions even more quickly than Malcolm Offord secured his as leader of Reform in Scotland. Mr Offord is another bored multi-millionaire, city-boy who fancied having a wee go at the politics. His dire media appearances since ‘defecting’ to Reform – also from the Tories – reveal him to be an arrogant, entitled chancer with all the depth of a game-show host, but none of the charisma.

Mr Offord’s rapid elevation meant that someone else in the Scottish operation had to get shafted. Predictably, that someone was Thomas Kerr, the former Glasgow Conservative councillor who had single-handedly done all the heavy lifting for Reform in Scotland prior to Mr Offord deciding to throw his yachtsman’s cap into the ring.

Mr Kerr seemed to represent the constituency of voters that Nigel Farage needs if his political hustle is ultimately to succeed. He was reared in Cranhill in Glasgow’s east end and has lived family experience of the effects of addiction in working-class communities. As such, he’d have been considered too real for the SNP.

The Labour Party in Scotland would have wanted him to participate in paintball games and bonding exercises. Peter Mandelson and Morgan McSweeney would have deemed his home address and lack of a university degree as proof of extreme Socialism.

Reform’s great political swindle has been made easier by the attitude of the SNP and Labour to working-class people in Scotland and England. The SNP’s loathing for Scotland’s poor has long been evident in its callous dismissal of the victims of grooming gangs; the issuing of free passes to men who use prostitutes, and the endangering the safety of female prisoners. Before then, they had sought to criminalise working-class families by encouraging their children and their friends to snoop on them for evidence of un-inclusive language.

The callousness of Reform and its affluent leadership team though, is much more egregious than the SNP’s social conditioning. Reform have convinced poor people on the second bottom rung of the social ladder that the people on the rung below them – immigrants and refugees – are a direct threat to their way of life. It’s a strategy deployed by the right since my Irish family and their friends were disembarking from boats in the Broomielaw in the 19th century.

It wasn’t immigrants though, who shut down the mines and the steelworks and the shipyards, even though they were still profitable. Refugees weren’t responsible for pension raids and spiriting wealth out of the UK into overseas tax havens. Asylum-seekers didn’t send working-class young men and young women to die in illegal wars in the Middle East.

Nor have they ever been guilty of selling large slices of our technological infrastructure to the country’s enemies. They don’t belong to a royal family, parts of whose vast multi-billion property portfolio were being used for sleepovers for Jeffrey Epstein.

The desperate people in the asylum hotels didn’t turn the surrounding neighbourhoods into post-industrial wastelands where governments permit thousands to die of drug addiction and where children don’t know if they’ll have homes to go to from one week to the next.

Nigel Farage and Suella Braverman and Robert Jenrick represent the kind of institutions and corporations which make stock-market killings betting on the movement of money out of poor neighbourhoods. They are backed by the sort of people who stockpiled Covid vaccines and then priced it out of the reach of third-world countries. Even now, these pharmaceutical firms are rubbing their hands in anticipation of Covid-2 when it happens.

Reform UK are crucial to the fix. They’ve simply inherited the legacy of the Tories: that the best way of avoiding scrutiny of these forces is to tell people that the small boats and the asylum hotels are always to blame.

Kevin McKenna is Scotland’s Feature Writer of the Year.

© Herald Scotland