The Glasgow councillor Thomas Kerr has defected from the Tories to Reform and I’m thinking about the time I walked down Shettleston Road with Mr Kerr and met a woman at the bus-stop called Lisa. What Lisa said stuck with me because what she and other Scots like her think might help explain what’s been happening in Scottish politics in the last ten years, and still is, and why Reform appears to be on the rise. Maybe we should all start listening to Lisa.

Lisa told us, as we stood there at the bus-stop, what it was like for her living in Shettleston. The knife crime is bad, she said, and the violence, and the dog mess, and the litter. We stood and watched one of the local school kids dump the lid off his takeaway on the ground without a second thought. Mr Kerr said people think because you live in the east end, it doesn’t matter. I asked Lisa, who’s in her forties, what the positives were and her answer was instinctive: “I don’t think I could give you a positive.”

I then asked Lisa how she’d voted over the years. Turned out she’d voted only once in her life and that was in 2014 for Scottish independence, which is what a lot of people living in Scotland’s more deprived areas did and who can blame them. They, and their parents, and their grandparents, and their great-grandparents, had voted Labour and they looked out their windows and saw that nothing had changed: the litter, the dog mess, the violence, the knife crime.

The independence referendum – and again, who can blame them – seemed liked an opportunity to try something else, which is why support for Yes was highest where poverty was........

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