A YOUGOV poll last week put Penny Mordaunt well ahead of her Tory Party leadership rivals with party members, who, of course, will decide their next leader and, by default, the next UK prime minister.
At her campaign launch she said, “recently I think our party has lost its sense of self”.
She added her priorities would be low tax, small state and personal responsibility. All the other candidates are basically parroting the same stuff, with Sunak being a wee bit different.
How utterly depressing is that! If you are part of a family that relies on food banks, or is getting perilously close to doing so, or digging out sleeping bags for the winter to snuggle into, just to watch the telly as your heating certainly won’t be getting turned on, such talk is a real kick in the stomach.
You are effectively being told that the reason you have insufficient resources to properly look after your family is due to your lack of personal responsibility! How dare you have the temerity to be so lacking in the self-reliance department?!
My interpretation of the Tories having “lost their sense of self” is that having to pretend to care about working-class folk in “Red Wall” areas in England has clearly been very wearing for the vast majority of them. Now that the “Red Wall” votes have done the job and delivered a hard Brexit, there is clearly no requirement for any more of this pretence.
It’s now back to “business as usual”, promising to look after their own kith and kin, mainly in the south of England where the LibDems are breathing down their necks. They have cynically established that they are capable of winning the next election, albeit with a much reduced majority, if they shore up their core vote and if “Red Wall” voters desert them, so be it!
As for us in Scotland? The only mention we get in the candidates’ utterings is that we can stick our referendum where the sun don’t shine. Charming! The latest figure for the number of Tory Party members I could find online was 124,000 in the UK in March 2018, with around 10% of them in Scotland. So possibly around 12,000 folk or so in Scotland have a say on who the next UK Prime Minister will be. The population of Grangemouth (mid-2020 figure) is 16,120.
This is truly shocking and yet another new low for democracy!
For all those in Scotland still committed to the Union, I really hope you are capable of taking personal responsibility for your family by being able to afford private health, social care and education for your bairns in this “small state” UK. Don’t say you were not warned.
Ivor Telfer
Dalgety Bay
THE long-running saga of choosing the next Tory leader and prime minister continues and we are saddled with the tedious Tory election process which allows the remaining candidates to appear on various TV hustings to put forward their case to be leader. But who would watch this parade of right-wing zealots, each trying to outdo the other in their contempt for ordinary people?
READ MORE: Penny Mordaunt would not allow indyref2 'under any circumstances'
After all, only six people in Scotland have a vote in the current process – those six being the Tory MPs representing constituencies in Scotland. It’s not exactly going to pull in the crowds, so why waste TV schedule time on this?
How many times have the BBC and STV ignored the SNP conference despite the party having in the region of 120,000 members (and potential viewers) yet they clear valuable TV time for a potential audience of six?
No wonder more people in Scotland than anywhere else in the UK refuse to pay the TV licence!
Cllr Kenny MacLaren
Paisley
Why are you making commenting on The National only available to subscribers?
We know there are thousands of National readers who want to debate, argue and go back and forth in the comments section of our stories. We’ve got the most informed readers in Scotland, asking each other the big questions about the future of our country.
Unfortunately, though, these important debates are being spoiled by a vocal minority of trolls who aren’t really interested in the issues, try to derail the conversations, register under fake names, and post vile abuse.
So that’s why we’ve decided to make the ability to comment only available to our paying subscribers. That way, all the trolls who post abuse on our website will have to pay if they want to join the debate – and risk a permanent ban from the account that they subscribe with.
The conversation will go back to what it should be about – people who care passionately about the issues, but disagree constructively on what we should do about them. Let’s get that debate started!
Callum Baird, Editor of The National
Comments: Our rules
We want our comments to be a lively and valuable part of our community - a place where readers can debate and engage with the most important local issues. The ability to comment on our stories is a privilege, not a right, however, and that privilege may be withdrawn if it is abused or misused.
Please report any comments that break our rules.
Read the rules hereLast Updated:
Report this comment Cancel