In a race to the bottom, what happens when you already occupy this place? At a press event in Shettleston this morning, in the east end of Glasgow, Reform UK had obviously decided to cut out the performative nonsense and take us down to the base level of Scottish politics.

Perhaps their leader in Scotland, Malcolm Offord, had opted to stir the dregs, because, well … where else do you go when you’ve started the election campaign the way he has.

Inferring that Catholic schools were responsible for sectarianism could be dismissed as the ravings of an incomer who’s keen to show his new chums he’s really one of them, like the posh boy at a party swearing his wee head off after a few glasses of the jungle juice.

The revelation that he’d told the most homophobic and creepy joke you’ve ever heard though, seemed to suggest a basic lack of decency and common humanity.

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Sitting beside Mr Offord at the Tollcross International Swimming Centre, was Thomas Kerr, the former Tory group leader on Glasgow City Council. Mr Kerr grew up near these streets and has lived experience of the multi-deprivation which has stalked this neighbourhood for generations. His parents had both been victims of drug and alcohol addiction.

Mr Kerr’s testimony and resilience in opting for the political road less travelled in these parts had previously made you warm to him. And so you experienced a stab of chagrin when he started to introduce his party leader. Mr Kerr seems to have caught a bad dose of Offorditis. “This is a community where strangers are continually prioritised over local people.”

For God’s sake, Thomas, what in the name of the wee man are you talking like this, for? Strangers? Really. Afterwards, we’re having a chat as the photographers gather for pictures of Mr Offord. “What do you mean by ‘strangers’,” I ask him. “My family were once strangers in Glasgow. Would you be saying that about us?”

Both he and Mr Offord are trying to say that refugees and asylum-seekers are now flooding in to Glasgow relatively unchecked owing to a well-meaning but chaotic policy that seems to put the needs of ‘strangers’ before the indigenous white population. They don’t actually say ‘white’, but this is exactly what they mean and what they want people in neighbourhoods like Shettleston to understand by it.

This swimming centre had hosted events at the 2014 Commonwealth Games and will do so again later this year. Across the road though, two large advertising vans were parked, brandishing slogans which seemed to mock all that these international baths represent. “Scotland is at Breaking Point,” they yelled in unison. They channelled the same energy as those shameful posters that Nigel Farage produced during the Brexit referendum campaign, depicting a long queue of migrants under the slogan “Britain is at Breaking Point”.

Thomas Kerr at least should know the truth about these places he claims as his home turf. At the start of the millennium, this parliamentary constituency was cited by the Child Poverty Action Group as possessing the highest rates of poverty and social deprivation in the UK. “Shettleston Man,” became a descriptor of the low life expectancy here, due to chronic health inequality.

Reform’s Scottish leader Malcolm Offord (Image: Jeff Mitchell/Getty Images)

In this place and in nearby Parkhead and Dalmarnock, the deprivation levels have remained stubbornly high as other communities have experienced slight improvements. Mr Kerr ought to know that these issues were here many, many years before the arrival of economic migrants.

Malcolm Offord’s 20-minute address was bleak, uninformed and delivered in the scripted monotone of one who’s as strange to this neighbourhood as the immigrants and refugees of whom he spoke.

“Glasgow is bursting at the seams,” he says.

The city now houses 6% of UK asylum seekers despite them forming only 1% of UK population, and it's costing a fortune, he added.

“Locals are unable to get a home.” “The political class is gas-lighting people in working class communities.” “Immigration is a top-three issue on the doorsteps.”

More than 80% of his speech was given over to this tawdry stuff. There was little in the way of providing solutions on evils that have haunted these families for many decades. Let’s remember that while they were reeling from de-industrialisation and Thatcherism, Mr Offord was making vast fortunes in mergers, acquisitions and private equity investment with some of the most rapaciously capitalistic institutions in the city of London and Wall Street. The greed and financial incontinence of this sector contributed to the worldwide credit crunch.

The damage to communities like Shettleston during this period far exceeded any of the ill effects of the UK’s asylum policy. Where was Mr Offord when these people for whom he now purports to care were left twisting in the winds of pitiless capitalism? 

His only valid truth came when he talked about the disdain the political class reserves for Scotland’s working-class communities. These people, mainly in the SNP and the Scottish Greens have marginalised the people who live in these places. They divert hundreds of millions towards projects and third-sector organisations who specialise in condemning the people who live on these streets. The trade union movement has abandoned them too.

A gulf now separates the Scottish Government and its third-sector glove-puppets from the lived reality on these streets. They’ve virtually handed Reform UK the keys to them.

A couple of hours before Malcolm Offord and Thomas Kerr began painting their bleak pictures, Robert Jenrick – another Tory defector to Reform UK - was telling the BBC about what he thought about Britain’s working-class communities. “At Reform, we would take away welfare for people with the most mild conditions, like anxiety,” he said.

Mr Jenrick is also a millionaire. What would he or Mr Offord know about the anxiety that’s caused directly by multi-deprivation? What a pair of political frauds they are.

Kevin McKenna is Scotland's Feature Writer of the Year

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