IT didn’t take long for the inauguration of Joe Biden as 46th President of the US to turn into a canonisation. Since he won the race for the White House, America’s new Commander-in-Chief seems to have been endowed with saintly virtues. I haven’t seen any reports yet of gargantuan fish catches off the Florida coast or dead people emerging from their tombs but, judging by the rivers of liberal exultation at his elevation, this seems only to be a matter of time.

As Scotland’s own media and political elites gathered on social media to trill and throw palms you’d be forgiven for thinking that the new President had just invented democracy. Indeed some on Twitter, land of the Twee, actually said he’d overthrown a dictator. Perhaps, in the virtue-signalling euphoria of it all, they’d simply forgotten that Mr Trump had been installed in the White House by a popular, blue-collar revolt against the political establishment four years previously. And that this time around he’d polled more votes than any sitting President in living memory.

Perhaps they think that, despite re-committing US dollars to NATO the new President will summon all of America’s enemies (any country with a Socialist government) to Washington; tell them their sins have been forgiven and help in rebuilding all those economies that the CIA had helped to wreck. They were all still wading in their fake sanctimony as the Capitol Hill mob sought to “steal democracy”. They would know all about stealing democracy, having tried to cancel Brexit last year.

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Few among those who rushed to proclaim President Biden as the saviour of the left will ever get round to asking how his predecessor managed to attract and retain so many millions of America’s working class voters. They could start by asking the new chief about his own attitudes to blue-collar workers.

As recently as June, 2019 the new President was involved in a testy exchange with one of these rust-belt, dungaree-type chappies in Iowa. The 83-year-old voter had dared to ask him about the business dealings of his son, Hunter, with a Ukrainian gas company that was paying him around £25k a month for the privilege of his previously unrevealed expertise in the eastern European energy sector. The man who intended to free the US from the ugliness of Trumpism responded by calling his 83-year-old inquisitor “fat” and “a damned liar”.

President Biden and his new global acolytes denounced his predecessor for sowing deep division and hate across America. Yet in this country, where the gap between the chosen few and the frozen many has never been greater, it was existing societal divisions that propelled Mr Trump to the White House. Few have paused to ask why working class people in states like Michigan voted for Bernie Sanders in the primaries and then transferred their allegiances to Donald Trump against Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Those who believe Joe Biden will heal these divisions just by being presidential and having a bigger vocabulary are kidding themselves. This man is a fully-subscribed functionary of Wall Street whose interests he’s consistently championed and protected in a 50-year career that stretches back to the Watergate era.

This was most apparent in 2005 when he successfully piloted a new Bankruptcy Protection Bill backed by the major credit card companies, which made it virtually impossible for low-income citizens and students to discharge debt. It was one of the major aggravators of the 2008 banking crisis.

The American political writer Alexander Cockburn said of this new champion of the left: “The first duty of any senator from Delaware is to do the bidding of the banks and large corporations which use the tiny state as a drop box and legal sanctuary. Biden has never failed his masters in this primary task. Find any bill that sticks it to the ordinary folk on behalf of the Money Power and you’ll likely detect Biden’s hand at work.”

The most astounding aspect of America’s unfolding, four-year psychodrama isn’t that a paranoid delinquent made it to the White House. It’s that the neo-liberal, corporate lackey who’s replaced him has become the darling of a manicured left. And so, once more, the American working classes in this hopelessly unequal country are disenfranchised, conveniently forgotten by a professional left for whom they are just a little bit too rough and unguarded and ill-educated to be entrusted with an actual voice.

The same softening-up process has been evident in Scotland in the 20 years since the birth of devolution was supposed to give a voice to the voiceless. The Scottish working-class remains permanently locked out of Holyrood amidst the lawyers and party hacks who seek favour in a one-party state designed to control aspirations rather than raise them.

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After 20 years of honeyed sentiments from all of the main left-wing parties about reducing inequality their work was tested last summer. This was a moment of truth for school pupils and their families from poor communities who finally got to realise that this mediocre managerial class could only produce a model that predicted them to fail. Until our working-class communities are permitted to represent themselves at Holyrood we will always have these outcomes.

I wouldn’t hold my breath, though, for that day to arrive. Civic Scotland is dominated by a smug, liberal elite whose radicalism stretches no further than sticking a double pronoun on their chi-chi Twitter handles and suddenly discovering that black lives matter after all. These self-appointed sentinels of democracy scan the blogosphere looking to cancel those whom they consider delinquent while seeking eye-catching slogans and optics.

In this period where they’ve done little more than reinforce each other’s salon obsessions, the conditions and prospects for our poorest communities are as bleak as ever. If you don’t believe this then watch closely over the next few years to discover who will be worst affected by the economic and health consequences of coronavirus.

Socialism and radical action once combined to lift these communities out of poverty but these no longer exist in Scotland. They have been replaced by political badge-kissers who all think that Joe Biden is a liberal.

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