YOU’RE forced to conclude that an act of dissimulation on the grand scale must occur each time the UK Conservative Party wins an election. By any reasonable calculation, those who always stand to benefit from their policies and worldview – landowners; multiple property owners; the affluent middle classes (as opposed to those merely clinging to that bracket) together amount to a low, single-figure percentage. They are heavily outnumbered by those who stand to gain least from Tory policies: the working-class and the lower middle-class.

The Social Mobility Barometer, commissioned by the UK Government and published just prior to the 2017 UK election, differed from many such surveys by asking 5,000 of the actual public their views about class and social division in modern Britain. Nearly half of the UK population considered themselves to be working-class and just over a third regarded themselves as middle-class. A mere one per cent of those polled by YouGov believed themselves to be upper class. Nearly four-fifths of those who sprang from a working-class household felt they still belonged to this social bracket.

Among the other more eye-catching headline figures were that almost 80% believed there was a large gap between the social classes. A mere 12% felt this gap was ‘very small’ while more than one third believed it to be ‘very large’. The report said: “Following on from this, 44% say that it is becoming harder for people from less advantaged backgrounds to move up in society – compared with just 18 per cent who say it is getting easier.”

You might also reasonably think that a gap of five years since the Social Mobility Barometer was published might render such percentages out-of-date. Yet, it’s reasonable also to conclude – given all that has since unfolded in the UK and in the world – that the numbers of those believing Britain to be an unequal society with large class divisions will have grown. And that nothing has happened which will have moved the dial on the 49% who identified as working-class in 2017.

The effects of an extreme Brexit together with the post-pandemic recovery and global uncertainty caused by the war in Ukraine are already beginning to hit those with the fewest protections. During this time, only the super-rich increased their wealth (mainly from advantageous speculation in the febrile share markets). The merely affluent had the means simply to sit it out and hang on to what they had. Those with little or nothing to spare face a cost-of-living apocalypse which will expunge any aspirations they might once have held to improve their situations. The struggle to maintain a dignified existence will absorb every fibre of their being.

And yet still the Tories will look to support from among these most disadvantaged sectors to see them home at the next election. They know there simply aren’t enough of their natural supporters to win an election. The usual artifices – reinforced by a dutiful right-wing press - will be deployed: historic military triumphalism; royal births and jubilees and some age-old defamations about the left, dutifully conveyed by the overwhelmingly right-wing press.

Even now, the usual targets are being lined up. You can always tell that the DEFCON level of social threat has been raised when ‘Marxist’ and ‘hard-left’ get scattered with abandon in the main newspapers of the establishment. Thus, any threatened strike action by trade unions is proof of ‘Marxism’ and some Trade Union leaders are labelled ‘hard left’ for seeking modest improvements in the pay and conditions of their members. Two years ago these workers were risking their health and that of their families to keep the country moving during Covid-19. Then they were hailed as heroes. But heroes quickly become something else when they ask if that newly-exalted status might come with a financial consideration. Why can’t the ungrateful curs be content with a doorstep cheer?

As the war in Ukraine has proceeded so has a campaign to marginalise others on the left by giving them the Jeremy Corbyn treatment. Thus, they are called ‘Friends of Russia’ by asking difficult questions about the extent to which NATO’s aggression and historic diplomatic failures have contributed to the Ukraine crisis. These have echoes in some of the wilder accusations which dogged Mr Corbyn when it began to dawn on the UK establishment that Labour now had a leader who might actually threaten its hegemony rather than simply parrot “we’re all in it together” in the Tony Blair/Keir Starmer tradition.

It would seem then that there can hardly be a more propitious set of circumstances in which to detail and launch a case for Scottish independence. Yet, as another spring passes without the predicted SNP push for independence before the end of 2023 we now move on to the summer with its customary White Papers, preparatory documents and the fabled ‘case for independence’. This is a document so long foretold that it’s probably been written on parchment and require Sanskrit scholars to unravel its secrets.

And what then? It seems the SNP have adopted a new strategy preparatory to seeking a referendum. Alex Salmond once said that not much would change in an independent Scotland and that we’d still be bound by ancient ties of kinship, emotion and shared cultural heritage with the rest of the UK.

Nicola Sturgeon now seems to have taken this a stage further: nothing whatsoever will change. NATO lapdogs (tick); nuclear client state (tick); Bank of England platinum card members (tick); one-stop, global energy discount shop (tick). The principles of Tory Austerity have even been summoned to underpin the message that an independent Scotland will be a low-calorie version of Tory England – right down to the baiting of the Unions (“they’re all fascists”, don’t you know) and hammering public sector workers. All that’s missing from SNP headquarters in the Royal Mile (an appropriate location) is a statue of Margaret Thatcher.

It’s a novel way of signalling your intent to determine your own future, but who knows? As Mowgli says in The Jungle Book: “I’ll do anything to stay in the jungle”. Altogether now: “I wanna walk like you; talk like you …”