The fetid ugliness of Trump’s politics is far from finished in weary Scotland

IT is rare indeed for me to experience a lip-wobble when a politician is speaking. I am from scotland. Here the curled lip is the more customary response to oratory from vote-seekers.

The curled lip, the glazed eye and the sense of lethargy you find in wildebeest stuck in quagmires.

But, for a second there, Joe Biden made my bottom lip go. ‘Politics,’ he said, in a memorable section of his inaugural presidential address, ‘doesn’t have to be a raging fire destroying everything in its path. Every disagreement doesn’t have to be a cause for total war.’

Reaching into his nation’s history, he found a narrative which linked America’s possible future with the ideals of its founding fathers – and he echoed Abraham Lincoln as he dedicated his ‘whole soul’ to bringing unity to his fractured land.

And, although he never mentioned his absent predecessor by name, Biden’s words signalled a sea change in the way his nation did politics.

Before his speech began, America had heard its favourite folk song. ‘This land is your land, this land is my land,’ wrote Woody Guthrie in 1940. ‘From California to the New York Island…’ A vast place, a proud people – and this week, after four years in which a deeply unpleasant commander in chief fomented division, they were offered a fresh start by a credible leader who promised to level with them.

Call me a sucker if you like, but I nearly blubbed. It was not just joy afflicting the lower lip, however. It was envy, too.

Here in scotland we have been in political stasis for some 14 years. In May we are due to have an election which, barring a miracle, will guarantee more of the same.

There is no fresh start anywhere on the horizon save for the one Nicola sturgeon promises after scotland becomes independent. The price of that fresh start is too high. It means the loss of my country – Britain – and of my identity – British.

In scotland we don’t sing songs like This Land is Your Land because we now live in a state of perpetual division over the land’s constituent parts. I prefer to think of Cornwall as my land in the same way the New York islander thinks of California as his.

Our current political masters prefer that we limit our sense of ownership to the land that lies north of Hadrian’s Wall – and see those on the other side of it as foreigners.

I envy the Americans their folk song. Here, we seem to prefer a tune which romanticises a 1314 battlefield victory over one of our Union partners. This partnership began in 1707 – long before the UsA even became a country – but our folk song wants to talk about the time in the 14th century when we gave proud Edward and his army a doing.

Arrogance

On this side of the pond we haven’t been blessed with a political reboot in donkey’s years. Instead we have an administration fully embedded in its seat of power, with all the arrogance and complacency that domination of the political landscape brings.

It was around this time last year, on the eve of the scottish Budget, that we discovered the sNP man who was due to deliver it had been sending hundreds of creepy texts to a 16-year-old boy.

Almost 12 months on, former finance secretary Derek Mackay continues to draw his full MsP salary although he has not been seen in the scottish parliament since the day of his disgrace.

Down in London, though, Margaret Ferrier has darkened Westminster doors again, concluding that it is fine to carry on doing so as an MP despite the time last autumn when she knowingly brought Covid-19 into the building. Elsewhere in this righteous empire we have Glasgow MsP John Mason who saw fit to include a questionnaire on his website, drilling his constituents on their views on independence when they contacted him for help.

What on earth would that have to do with carrying out his constituency duties on their behalf?

And, in our First Minister, we have a leader who is doubtless as appalled as I am by the last four years of American politics yet remains oblivious to its parallels with her own regime.

Fake News? Miss sturgeon is a past master. Last year, again around this time, the First Minister drew her Twitter followers’ attention to a remarkable phenomenon in Brussels where a light show projected onto the European Commission headquarters featured the words ‘scotland’ and ‘Europe’ linked with a love heart.

This she portrayed as Europe ‘leaving a light on’ for scotland. The truth was her party paid for the stunt – and broke strict Brussels rules in the process.

Remind you of anyone? Any other national leader you can think of who used lies on Twitter to skew their countryfolk’s perception of reality?

since then, Miss sturgeon has become the supposed ‘safe pair of hands’ in the coronavirus crisis, though this owes more to her Trumpesque dismissal of awkward questions as ‘illegitimate’ than it does to superior strategising.

The illusion of deftness is helped along, too, when you have public health advisers such as Edinburgh University Professor Devi sridhar who are unabashed political acolytes.

The Covid strategy in England lacked the scottish Government’s ‘clarity of vision’, she opined in an interview this week, adding that fewer people would have died if scotland were independent.

Like the quagmire-bound wildebeest, we have languished for so many years in the Nationalist swamp, sunk so deep in it, that we barely remember that this stuff is an outrage, that public health advisers’ expertise is contingent on their being apolitical.

Oh, what I wouldn’t give for a glimpse of that inspiring statesman or woman to pull us out and grant us our fresh start.

But, as we scan the political plains, there is little sign of imminent rescue.

We are governed by two parliaments and the default position of the party leading one of them is to oppose whoever happens to be leading the other.

Dismay

We are run – as scotland’s fishing industry has learned to its dismay in recent times – by governments who would sooner disparage and blame each other than work together towards practical solutions.

Politics doesn’t have to be a raging fire, says Joe Biden, but the divisions in this land, the very battle to divide it up or pull it back together, sadly make it so.

Yes, it is easy to be envious of a country where the entirety of the land is indisputably everybody’s – where, despite the current polarisation of its people, they are, after all, the United states.

I rejoice in their new chapter and, if I were an American, I suspect I would have blubbed buckets at the installation of a decent man in the White House after the ugliness of the past four years.

But I am a scot and here the ugliness is a long way from over. Who knows, perhaps among the billions who heard Mr Biden’s words this week there lurks a seminal political figure in the making, someone who will pledge their ‘whole soul’ to our Union, paint a picture of better days and inspire hope that he or she will deliver on them.

May they get here soon. Our fresh start is long overdue.