Conservative leadership: How bruising TV debates have helped make the case for Scottish independence – Angus Robertson MSP

The more the public gets to see of the Tory leadership candidates the less they like them.

Kemi Badenoch, Penny Mordaunt, Rishi Sunak, Liz Truss and Tom Tugendhat take part in a Conservative party leadership debate on Channel 4 (Picture: Victoria Jones/PA)

With poll numbers tanking, no wonder frontrunners Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss have withdrawn from a scheduled TV debate. With the opening bruising TV encounters exposing all of the contenders as unfit for the office of Prime Minister, it’s hardly surprising they are now concentrating on the immediate electorate of Tory MPs rather than the public.

Blue-on-blue backbiting involves charges of lying, political expediency, economic illiteracy and being out of touch.

Despite having happily served under Boris Johnson, they now can’t run away quickly enough from their responsibilities as enablers of the worst Prime Minister in living memory. They claim the country is a mess, even although it’s the Tories who have been in charge.

At present, the race favourites remain BoJo’s tax-raising Chancellor, Sunak, who has presided over the cost-of-living crisis, and BoJo’s Foreign Secretary, Truss, who didn’t know the difference between the Black and Baltic Seas, was humiliated by her thuggish Russian opposite number Sergei Lavrov and couldn’t even find the way out of her own campaign launch.

The leadership contest has helpfully reminded the public that, under Sunak, the Tories have wasted an astonishing £15bn of taxpayers’ money on servicing government debt and faulty PPE, while Truss has crashed relations with the EU on the Northern Ireland Protocol which threatens to cause a trade war with our biggest trading partners.

Just as the country is crying out for action on the cost-of-living crisis, spiralling inflation, low growth and appalling labour shortages, the Tories are navel-gazing and tacking to the hard right.

It’s now apparently mainstream for Conservatives to call for the UK to ditch the European Convention on Human Rights, call into question net-zero pledges to save the environment and scrapping safeguards agreed while the UK was in the EU.

On Scotland, they’re just as extreme and out of touch. Every single one of the Tory leadership candidates are democracy deniers.

Despite the Scottish electorate having elected a majority of MSPs to deliver a referendum on independence, the wannabe Conservative PMs have all said they will deny Scotland a democratic vote. That’s not mainstream leadership: it’s authoritarian drivel.

The UK Tory leadership candidates have all shown they have absolutely nothing to offer Scotland. Their party has not won a single national election in Scotland since 1955 and they are not about to start now.

None of them has had a single concrete suggestion about reforming the UK. They are empty vessels. They all expect to carry on governing at Westminster whilst ignoring the Scottish electorate, the Scottish Parliament and the Scottish Government.

In recent days, we have been reminded about the appalling Tory approach to government, with outgoing Prime Minister Johnson hosting a party at Chequers instead of attending a Cobra meeting on the heatwave, and doing a photoshoot in a Typhoon jet.

Scotland didn’t vote for Johnson, Sunak, Truss or the other Tory leadership contenders. The Conservative party are perennial losers in Scottish elections, but their entitled and extreme candidates think they can carry on regardless.

If ever there was a reminder needed that Scotland has a better democratic future as in independent country, the Tories are making the case strongly at the moment.

Angus Robertson is the SNP MSP for Edinburgh Central and Constitution, External Affairs and Culture Secretary