Someone asked Ernest Hemingway how he had gone bankrupt. “Two ways,” the great writer had replied: “Gradually, then suddenly.” The decline of the left in Scotland and the UK follows a similar trajectory.

For more than a century, old High Toryism reinforced by corporate capital had deployed every weapon at its disposal to repel the steady encroachment of working-class interests on to their territory. They had resisted with every fibre of their being the emergence of the trade union movement; the rise of the Labour Party; the concept of health care being free at the point of delivery and the right of working-class children to access free higher education.

The Tories’ worst nightmare was the egalitarian society imagined by the early socialist thinkers and Labour leaders. It was where good health, a long life, decent housing and a high-quality education could be accessed by those whom they’d always viewed as the lower orders.

After two world wars in which the mass sacrifice of those lower orders had preserved Britain’s way of life, the Tories and the UK Establishment which relied on their protection had been forced to concede the territory they’d fought to keep for themselves. Inevitably, that also meant accepting other little improvements in the lives of ordinary people: maternity leave, paid holidays, sickness benefits and the right to withdraw your labour in pursuit of fair pay and conditions.

Read more by Kevin McKenna

It was only when Margaret Thatcher gained power that the British Establishment began to recoup some of its historical losses. Even then, the fightback had to rely on several lies. The assets of North Sea oil were used to find the billions to pay off the miners. MI5 agents infiltrated the leadership of the NUM. The right to buy your council house was portrayed as a........

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