DURING the 1987 General Election campaign, a now infamous poster was produced showing a group of young people taking part in a demonstration. Across their various T-shirts and badges are anti-police slogans, support for CND and the name of a Greenham Common feminist group.

The leader of the gang, an archetypal punk straight out of The Young Ones, is flanked by signs for Militant Rule and, intriguingly, Gay Sports Day. To socially conservative voters in the late 1980s, the threat illustrated on this now antiquated piece of propaganda wasn’t any one of these issues alone, but a reminder that the British way of life itself was under threat.

Thankfully the solution was at hand. The tagline of the poster reads “Labour Camp. Do you want to live in it?” before promoting a vote for the Conservative Party.

If there is one tactic right-wing activists and politicians know they can reliably fall back on to bring their supporters to heel, it’s a good old-fashioned culture war. Fear of “the Other” has been used throughout history to benefit the politically powerful, where challenges to dominant ideologies have been reframed as threats to mainstream society and used to advance far-right agendas or distract from a government’s own ineptitude.

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Looking at the Tory Government’s track record of late, it’s easy to see why they would be grasping for a quick fix. Mismanagement of the coronavirus pandemic has left thousands dead; a car-crash Brexit is approaching amid a plunging recession; and Scotland hasn’t so much dipped a toe into the waters of independence as it has waded out waist-deep to get a feel for the temperature.

Last week, it was reported that Tory MPs are seeking to shore up their weakening support by weaponising issues such as transgender rights, while loudly playing Rule Britannia over anyone trying to have a discussion about Britain’s colonial past. In this case, the enemy is “woke” politics, a catch-all term that has become the latest incarnation of “political correctness gone mad”.

According to The Spectator’s deputy political editor, Katy Balls, one Tory MP went as far as confirming that it was that “or the current approach where we end up having to talk about how rubbish we are at testing”.

The threat of gay activists, people of colour and feminists undermining traditional values has been a repeated talking point for the right whenever it finds itself under threat.

Looking across the pond to America, Donald Trump was positively swept to victory on a wave of fascistic sloganeering and culture war rhetoric that delivered him to the White House. To quote communications expert Anat Shenker-Osorio: “The right uses the same talking points everywhere, all they do is run it through a localised spellcheck.”

Right-wing supporters in the UK might not be chanting “Build The Wall”, but their views on immigration and “woke” politics aren’t that different.

The latest revelation from the Home Office that plans are under consideration to build centres for asylum seekers up to 4000 miles away from mainland Britain only reinforces that. In considering where to build processing centres for families fleeing war-torn home countries and seeking asylum, Home Secretary Priti Patel has considered not only Ascension Isle in the South Atlantic, but decommissioned oil rigs in the North Sea and disused ferries moored up offshore.

Anyone who has had the misfortune of dealing with the UK’s asylum system can tell you how inhumane it already is. Just a month ago, a group of Syrian asylum seekers was flown out of the UK and dumped on the streets of Madrid in Spain with nowhere to go.

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At its heart, these proposals to treat asylum seekers like cattle are not practical – but practicality is unlikely to be the goal. Patel knows that offshore facilities will play well to the anti-immigration voting bloc that constantly has one foot in the Conservative Party and the other wherever Nigel Farage has made his bed. She knows this in the same way that she knew referring to human rights lawyers as “activists” would undermine fair process for asylum seekers, and reinforce the belief that British values were under threat from political insurgents the same way they were in 1987.

Her statement in August that proposed asylum reform plans would “send the left into meltdown” are a reminder that the needs of a marginalised community appear to be of less importance than stoking the flames of a culture war against the left.

Rather than allow ourselves to be dragged along with the Conservative Party, who seek to throw marginalised groups under the bus to further their own agenda, Scotland has another option. Independence remains the only way to fully bring immigration into our own hands, and away from successive Westminster governments who would use it as a political football.

That being said, it would be naive to think vulnerable communities in Scotland are not also at risk of being used as pawns in a culture war of our own. The solution is listening to what the people in question have to say – not what is said about them.