MHAIRI Black MP is right to highlight the right-ward drift of the Tory party under Boris Johnson (SNP’s Mhairi Black in stark warning over rightward-drift of the Conservatives, July 11).

This has been happening for a few years in an attempt to stop Ukip cornering the market in extreme right-wing ideology. The Tories moved in – Boris took out the more moderate (in Tory terms) MPs and will leave behind a party full of right-wing fantasists who won’t take any responsibility for their own actions.

Under Boris, the Tory mantra of blaming the poor, blaming the dispossessed and blaming migrants has been taken to a new level. Not content with breaking international law and potentially bringing violence back on to the streets of Northern Ireland, the Tories are intent on blaming the EU for their failure to scrutinise the Brexit bill they signed off.

They now have the European Convention on Human Rights in their sights with many Tories – and most of their supporters – happily confusing this as a relic of the EU when in fact the UK was one of the founding signatories when this came into force in 1953.

Who would ever vote to have a government that does not respect human rights? The proposed Bill of Rights will put more power into the hands of the openly corrupt politicians in Westminster. MPs ignored the Covid rules so that they could continue to party and laugh at everyone else following the rules they made up!

All the while the UK Treasury has been robbed by Tory politicians with one dodgy contract after another, resulting in billions of pounds being removed from public services.

In order to be selected as leader of this bunch you have to win their approval and it’s clear that standing up for human rights would ensure you don’t get past the first round.

That’s why we now see one right-winger after another trying to outdo each other on how hard they will be on everyone who isn’t a Tory!

Not content with syphoning money from public services, each contestant has been promising more tax cuts which will put even more pressure on such services until the Tories decide that full privatisation of the NHS is the only solution. It wasn’t that long ago that removing human rights was unthinkable – how long before the NHS is broken up and sold off?

So the most right-wing group of Tory MPs in the history of the UK Parliament will whittle the contestants down to the final two for their membership to decide on the eventual winner.

You can be guaranteed that the membership of the Tory Party won’t be representative of the public at large. These are the same people who willingly pay their membership fees to a party led by Boris Johnson which has destroyed the economy and didn’t give a damn about almost 200,000 deaths from Covid.

They will vote for someone to look after their interests alone and to hell with everyone else.

Of course we may get a general election at some point but in UK terms there isn’t much of an option since all the main parties have followed the Tory drift to the right, with all of them promising to make Brexit work.

In Scotland we do have a choice. It doesn’t matter how many times the BritNats refuse to listen, we need to keep voting for independence. Using a general election as a plebiscite is one way to assert Scotland’s claim to independence and we need all of our indy-supporting parties to come together to maximise this vote. We can’t afford this Union – where even human rights won’t be respected. Independence is the only way to maintain the human rights that every individual on the planet deserves.


Cllr Kenny MacLaren
Paisley