If our politics are broken, don’t overlook the Tories’ role
I READ Neil Mackay’s article with some dismay (“Have Sturgeon and Ross found the secret to fixing our broken politics?”, November 25).
Some of the fundamental disagreements between political parties simply reflect the views of voters and that, surely, is as it should be. In Scotland that most obviously applies to the constitutional issue.
But political parties and their allies can manufacture division, too.
The prime example is Brexit, achieved through a referendum but which was won by a combination of egregious departures from the truth and dark money, which employed Cambridge Analytica to target voters through a huge and wellfunded Facebook disinformation campaign.
Then there is the predominantly Tory press, and its online presence, which mobilised voters through inflammatory rhetoric such as the infamous decrying of judges as “enemies of the people”.
Other political parties, and their voters, are entitled to hold the perpetrators at arm’s length and more.
Further, the Conservative-led coalition of 2010-15 claimed “we are all in this together” in its response to the financial crisis, a patent untruth as austerity, by design, affected those on the lowest incomes most.
Austerity was also economically counter-productive but achieved the ideological aim of shrinking the state, which in turn led to a lack of preparation for a pandemic by ignoring the recommendations of Exercise Cygnus, a crossgovernment exercise in 2016 to test the country’s response to a serious influenza pandemic, long before Covid struck.
The Conservatives have been an uncompromisingly ideological party since 1979 and have driven the UK rightward based on a minority of the vote backed up by dark donor money and willing media propagandists.
If our politics are broken, as Mr Mackay says, it is largely because of an ideological unwillingness of Conservatives to compromise on the biggest issues and to play by their own rules.
How many does it take to tango?
Councillor Alasdair Rankin (SNP),
City of Edinburgh Council, Edinburgh.