Scotland is a conservative country

I went to Scotland last week to byr a kilt. That is what I feel I am at that age now. Lacking even a single drop of Scottish blood in my veins, I’ve opted for the Ninian tartan, which was commissioned for Pope Benedict last year on his visit here. If anyone accuses me of cultural appropriation I shall tell them that I am in fact mid-transition to a woman: and if they don’t accept me, their name is going to be given to Yvette Cooper! 
 
I didn’t go to the SNP conference in Edinburgh: the party is as dismal as the Tories, beaten and melancholy. The Nats have exhausted all their options available to them. In the bygone days they were the ‘Tartan Tories ‘; in the 80s, Alex Salmond’s group swung them to the Left to capitalise on anti Thatcher sentiment. It was a message crudely summarised as: “If morons such as Kinnock and Miliband cannot defeat the Conservatives in Westminster, you should support independence. 
 
It is, in some ways, a much more potent image nowadays that Rishi Sunak has been defeated and Labour reborn, and the tactic exhausted. The constitutional question remains the defining issue of Scotland’s political discourse, but with its self-governing independence denied, the Nats have been gradually reduced to defining simply what it means to be Scottish – poverty in a decaying country – and wokeism, the idea that only Scottish nationalism of all nationalist movements in history is progressive and multicultural. 
 
In the last contested SNP leadership election, Forbes, a conservative Christian, lost to Humza Yousaf, a Muslim by a hair’s breath. It was considered that Forbes could not mentioned as a liberal spokesperson for Scotland. Humza, by some sort of a magic, could, even if he has suffered from a critical vote on homosexual marriage and started his term in Bute House, praying to Allah. Unwanted to the point that his own sister nicknamed him Humza Useless, his strangest episode came when he began listing the office-holders of state and shouted that they were all “white” – arguably the first Scottish nationalist to object to Scotland being run by his countrymen. 
 
Humza disappeared in the polls, I imagine, due to the fact that Scotland is progressive to the bonnet. When I wandered a few days north of the border, interviewing both SNP and Labour supporters, I did not come across a single Left-winger. The fetching teacher who was whining about the low discipline of the students. That bloody journalist who complained that you cannot dismiss incompetent educators. And the Nat who stated that Scotland receives few immigrants and should not get more but if it did they should not be welcomed. The SNP can afford to declare Scotland is open to everybody because very few would like to come over. Some of it are still characterized by poverty and low population density. Only 7% of this ‘Rainbow Nation’ is black while the remaining 93% is spread over whites of different origins. 

Scotland resembles the outlook and texture of England as it was three decades ago, a country very much alive in its nostalgia, very much dedicated to its traditions; and for a Catholic expatriate like myself, that translates into the local football squad, the Celtic club, and Jesus the Christ – in descending order of importance. 
 
My host took me round the Catholic high school which he works at as a teacher. Pictures of saints were also painted on the wall. 
 
The children were good mannered and were very compliant. I informed them about the job of a journalist, which elicited minor excitement – let alone when they saw that the newspaper in question leans to the right; I was like cro-magnon man that was just released from the body-ice. “Tell us what you believe. ” It’s funny, but trying to boil Toryism down for teenagers, one doesn’t mention Brexit or tax cuts, but rather: “We are fond of a King, and an Army; we are jealous of the Union; we want to be let alone – Freedom. ” “Well, then, let me guess your perfect Scottish Tory, ” I began, “it has to be Lulu, surely?” 
 
Only afterwards did I regret not having uttered Adam Smith, Sir Walter Scott or even Bonnie Prince Charlie, for whether rational or romantic, Scotland embodies conservatism in the British mind. When I was young, the stereotype of a Scotsman was not a beaten-down social worker with green hair, but a stoic, hardworking, musical inhabitant whose soul was free and elevated far above the Englishman’s. 
 
How peculiar it is – and I encourage the readers to guess as to why – that perhaps one of the most conservative regions of the United Kingdom boasts nearly no presence of this party. Watching and listening to the SNP in action, especially recently, you would forgive yourself for thinking that the only organised opposition comes in the form of J K Rowling. 
 
In secret, the final two or three Scottish Tories will in the next few weeks select either Meghan Gallacher, Russell Findlay or Murdo Fraser as their leader. None appeals. Gallacher is a write-off. Aren’t Findlay What opinions they got are Just opinions about crime. Fraser has broached the suggestion of eliminative the Scottish Tories to create a less entwined division, which is intriguing but you hazard conservatism becomes compelled to submit to the ‘woke’, remain Scotland of ‘Our NHS’. 
 
Has not the Tories been practicing that since devolution took place in the United Kingdom? To form an even greater Unionist coalition that left no one complaining, they shifted to the middle – they even began with endorsing what is now known as SNP’s debacle in education. 
 
Alternatively, another strategy could be to resurrect and mobilise the real, philosophical, Scots conservatism, capitalising on anti-progressive shift which seems all too possible. This time, for the first time ever, the Tories can begin to blame the condition of Scotland on the SNP, and Britain on Labour: a confederacy of dunces. 
 
First of all, there are seats to be gained for a party which is against net zero. Lanarkshire is covered with wind farms as far as one can see – all bleak, worn, and decaying – some of the collateral to yet another Joseph’s coat experiment inflicted upon the people of the region. Fifty years from now we shall be tearing those abominations down and asking ourselves why we ever built them.