Graham Martin watches in anguish as, like a scene from a zombie film, the once dead Tories twitch and start to move
We all know that bit in zombie films.
The tense, watchful silence. Then the corpse twitches and begins to reanimate.
Unless dealt with, it will stumblingly take to its feet and set a course for carnage, a rotten, fleshy palimpsest, with only one aim – to destroy the living and create others like itself.
Hands up who thought of this as we watched the Scottish Tories reanimate after last Thursday’s council elections?
Once consigned to the grave, the army of the Tory undead has escaped the crypt and is marching across the country – even some of our previously impregnable housing schemes – in a grotesque carnival of anti-life. It’s the hard right of the living dead.
In popular culture, a zombie outbreak is often used as a cipher for the break down of society, or as the catalyst of the apocalypse.
It might be pushing it a bit to claim that the election of a bunch of Thatcherite spivs, Rhodesia-nostalgist Powellite loons and austerity fetishists presages the End Times, but we have to be wary.
And, for all this zombie blether, we have to take this seriously.
The resurrection of the Tories – even if it is only as the receptacle of the despairing unionism of a dying demographic – represents a threat to the third sector.
More Tories on councils mean more Tories on committees, means more Tories making decisions which will affect communities and charities relying on local authority funds.
These people are no friends of ours. They think we should stick to our knitting. They will happily dance to the malign tune of the Daily Maill in attacking what we do.
Let’s look at who was elected last week. Where to start? There’s the one who posts links to fascist groups like Britain First and the English Defence League. There’s the one whose details appeared on a BNP database. There’s the one who thinks poor people shouldn’t have children. There’s the activists who think Nelson Mandela was a terrorist. There’s the one who ate a live hen harrier at a Countryside Alliance rally because the PC Nazis said he shouldn’t.
I may have made one of those up. But you’d believe it.
A large part of their success has been attributed to the “human face” Ruth Davidson has given them. Am I the only person not to have fallen for her? Because behind every “hilarious” photo-shoot and supposedly side-splitting gag is her defence of the rape clause and a family visiting a foodbank and a sanctioned claimant driven to suicide.
Davidson, at best, is the flesh of something once alive which has been pulled over the screaming death’s head of Tory-style free market capitalism.
Maybe, as some have claimed, we reached “peak Tory” at the local elections. But maybe, as Scottish politics cleaves along the lines set by the unresolved national question and as a paralysed Scottish Labour Party fails to reposition and continues to collapse, these howling wraiths from the past do have some sort of a future.
Maybe that’s them rattling the door and clawing at the windows and maybe we should be prepared.
Lock and load.
Graham Martin is news editor of Third Force News.
