THERE seems to be no end to Alister Jack's ability to put his expensively shod feet in it. In just a few days he has erased Scotland's border with England and opined that he, the Scotland Secretary, doesn't like to think of the United Kingdom as a union of four nations but rather as one single British nation.

He followed this up with the declaration that Scotland should have to wait at least 25 years for another independence referendum no matter how the people of Scotland vote. So if the people of Scotland vote for another referendum far sooner than that, as they did in May, then tough. Alister has gone for the erasure hat-trick and has unilaterally decided to abolish Scottish democracy itself. 

He followed it up with an equally unilateral rewriting of the Good Friday Agreement and decided that 60% of the population of Northern Ireland would have to be in favour of a referendum on Irish reunification before there could be one, a provision which is nowhere to be found in the Agreement and which predictably infuriated politicians representing the nationalist and republican community.

Now we have discovered that the wealthy Jack, who owns a large estate of more than 1200 acres in his Dumfries and Galloway constituency, along with other business interests, has pocketed almost £840,000 in government subsidies since 2014. 

Even though Jack is in receipt of state benefits equivalent to the amount paid to almost 120 couples in Universal Credit, he voted to remove the £20 per week uplift in Universal Credit at a time when food and energy prices are soaring, throwing many struggling families into penury and forcing them to decide whether to buy food or to heat their homes. £20 would not even buy Alister Jack lunch. He has admitted that he does not know anyone personally who relies on Universal Credit, no doubt because they cannot afford to frequent the expensive clubs, restaurants and venues he can pay for without a second's thought.

Jack represents the party that Douglas Ross recently claimed to be more in touch with working-class communities than the First Minister. As a former resident of Easterhouse, I'm sure there are not many people in working-class communities with 1200-acre estates who get more than £800,000 in benefits payments, but perhaps Douglas Ross thinks Easterhouse is full of them. 

The Tories are not merely out of touch, they are a party of venal hypocrites who punish the poor while they themselves benefit from the public purse to the tune of hundreds of thousands.

This piece is from today's REAL Scottish Politics newsletter, which is emailed out at 7pm every weekday with a round-up of the day's top stories and exclusive analysis from the Wee Ginger Dug.

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