Scotland is a tiny, poor, meaningless appendage on the edge of Britain, whose tenement-born population are condemned to Tory rule for the rest of their lifetimes.
That's the depressing picture this morning.
Westminster now has the most right-wing government in a generation. Amber Rudd and Jeremy Hunt have made racism OK. The mainstream media, controlled by a handful of right-wing barons, will take up this theme and soon we will have lynchings in the streets. Rupert Murdoch and Lord Rothermere, who between them control 60% of UK print media, will (ironically, in Murdoch's case) bang the no-foreigners drum.
As the excellent Dr Tanja Bueltmann has pointed out, they - the barons and the Tories - are shining their Tory-blue spotlights on 'foreigners' and 'immigrants' in order to distract our attention from the bigger issues.
The bigger issues are much, much more important than the bash-the-migrants distractions of the Tories. They are as big as the millions of refugees fleeing wars created, in part, by Westminster governments. As big as the poverty that affects 220,0000 children in Scotland, or that means poor Scots cannot warm their homes this winter. As big as climate change.
The people of Scotland did not vote for this right-wing mess. Scotland's view will be ignored while Westminster plunges into the Dark Ages of a 21st century Fortress Britain.
The Holyrood election is done, so the newspapers are looking for their next big story. They have the Brexit Terror Campaign, but even the Daily Mail can see that stories about quirky regulations from Brussels are hardly setting the readership alight. So we are back to the bump and grind of whose bed was shared by which politician.
Sex sells.
But it is wholly irrelevant to the measure by which we should be judging our politicians: are they capable giving people a better life? Can they help people out of poverty, with better jobs and better benefits? Can they create a measurably more equal society, reducing the wealth gap?
This is how we should be measuring our politicians. Not by the number of people they have euphemistically 'slept' with, but by the number of people whose lives they have changed for the better.
All the rest is just balls.
Enter the camp of the enemy, and read about it in The Telegraph. That is where you will learn their tactics.
Yesterday's report that George Osborne will cut £177m from the budget for Scotland this year illustrates how the Tories will work. They are going to spend the next four years harrying the (relatively) tiny group of 56 in Westminster. They are going to use their majority to force the SNP into a series of political corners.
The sound-bite writers have given them the phrase to use, and we can expect Osbameron to use it again and again: "put up or shut up".
Righteous indignation - "Scotland voted against austerity!", "Scotland didn't vote Tory!", "No more cuts" - is no use in realpolitik. This is not a moral or ethical issue, in Westminster. It is politics as chess, using the Westminster machinery (including, eventually and inevitably, the unelected House of Lords) to beat the Scots again, and again, and again until they acknowledge their impotence.
Operation Fear will be like a stroll in the Botanic Gardens compared to this. The Tories will play it out with no consideration for its impact in Easterhouse or Possil Park. Who cares if some poor woman loses her welfare payments...so long as we, the Tories, can crush the opposition.
The SNP will have to be very clever, and very agile, to avoid the political traps at Westminster.
In the last three days Ian Bell at the Herald, and Andrew, the Lallands Peat Worrier have both expressed their disillusion with politics. Ian Bell, who is a craftsman of a writer, said of the official start of the election campaign: "It was all acted out as though a tattered soap opera script from 20 years back had been mistaken for the latest episode." David Cameron made the ridiculous suggestion that this was a two-horse Con-Lab race - something that we all know to be untrue. Lallands Peat Worrier Andrew, whose writing is full of Gothic elegance, wrote about "...the nonsense and the flesh pressing, wet handshakes, hollow laughter and terrified smiles..."
It is easy to get disillusioned with politicians. As Ian Bell implied, politicians treat us like idiots. Why else would David Cameron stand outside No 10 and say that there was only him or Ed, and that if we voted Ed there would be "chaos."
There are loads of choices; we might vote Monster Raving Loony , or Green or SNP and eject all the expenses cheats, the yes-men, the non-exec directors who happen to be MPs, the Lords (off with their heads...)
And why does Ed Miliband persist in telling us that only his party can save the NHS? How short are our memories if we have forgotten how the same party privatised hospitals and used PFI to fund hospitals off the books?
So what can we do if we want to reduce child poverty in Scotland, or we want to get rid of Trident or we want to reform land ownership? Can we avoid the politicians? On child poverty, for example, we can help directly, or help indirectly (for example, by supporting Save the Children Fund's programme in Scotland). This is all good. But amongst the multiple causes of poverty are things that we must get the Government to change - whichever party is in power. We need to change the benefits system, we need to extend free childcare... and so on. Politicians - those same people who treat us like idiots - hold the levers to system change.
So if we want change we must grin and bear the Farrage-farrago and the old-Etonian Mess that we are going to be subjected to until May 7th, and then vote for the party that will push those levers and get the change we want. Which, in the case of this writer, is the SNP.
As the Anarchists said: vote early and vote often.
