RUTH DAVIDSON’s juvenile approach to conducting politics in Scotland was evident yesterday in her party’s response to the front page of The National. Murdo Fraser is a prominent acolyte in the Scottish Tories’ scarecrow faction which has been known to blame the melting glaciers in Greenland on a second “nasty and decisive” independence referendum. Fraser was somewhat exercised yesterday following The National’s front page story revealing that Nicola Sturgeon would be holding a summit meeting with the leaders of the Scottish Independence Convention at some point in the next few weeks. “The First Minister spending her time meeting independence campaigners will simply confirm the Scottish public’s view that independence always has and always will be the only thing the SNP cares about,” he said.

We’ll leave aside the observation that Ms Sturgeon has agreed to meet the leaders of the broad-based independence movement over the summer holidays. Perhaps though, this is being unkind to Mr Fraser, a politician whose entertaining interventions at Holyrood have led witnesses to wonder if he has wandered into the wrong building by mistake. It may well be that Mr Fraser simply doesn’t know that parliament is in recess at all.

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Fraser is one of those Tories who often reminds you of Father Jack, the raddled old soak in the Irish sitcom Father Ted. There he slumbers in his old, soiled chair sporadically bellowing “Drink!” or “Women!” whenever the Holy Spirit alights upon him. Fraser and his Tory confreres are known to startle innocent passers-by going about their business with shouts of “divisive referendum” for no apparent reason: it basically represents the sum total of the Scottish Tories’ political agenda; its alpha and omega and all points in between.

The driving force of this political infantilism is Fraser’s boss, Davidson, whose obsession with being photographed amidst military paraphernalia received a condign acknowledgment recently when she was named the honorary Colonel-in-Chief of that august fighting body of men and women, The Territorial Army.

Besides leaping around rural Scotland playing paintball games we know what else Davidson has been getting up to during recess.

The leader of the Scottish Tories, ever eager to convince her following that she is a political savant who occupies the reasonable centre ground of Scottish politics, was granted a large space by a website called Unherd (sic) to present her credentials.

In a couthy and simplistic 3000-word ramble about container ships and the work ethic which could have been written by John Boy in The Waltons, Davidson said this: “The world is a richer, healthier, better educated and more equal place than at any time in my lifetime.” She insisted this was so because of statistics claiming that “extreme poverty is being routed. Infant mortality has halved. Literacy rates are climbing. After two centuries of increasing global inequality, developing world growth has reversed the trend.”

It’s difficult to know where to start with mince such as this. Certainly, we have come a long way since Dickensian times. We no longer send unemployed, working class people to the poor house to break stones. Nor do we transport the victims of Irish Famine to Botany Bay for stealing loaves of bread from the robber barons of the Tory aristocracy in rural Ireland. And, happily, children no longer die in their tens of thousands of malnutrition, starving on the streets of London or being pressed into service as prostitutes. So yes, you have to hand it to Davidson, things are a wee bit better.

It’s doubtful if Davidson’s work would have been granted room in the New Internationalist which published an essay by David Hewitt in 2012 to coincide with the London Olympics. Hewitt wrote: “According to the Campaign to End Child Poverty four in 10 (or 650,000) London children now live in households where there is just £10 ($16) per person per day to cover everything, including utility bills.

“In Tower Hamlets, the local authority set to host the 2012 Games, 52 per cent of children live in poverty just a stone’s throw from the riches of the City, while in the borough of Islington, the figure stands at 43 per cent. Compare this to child poverty levels of just seven per cent and five per cent for the constituencies of Prime Minister David Cameron (Whitney) and his deputy Nick Clegg (Sheffield Hallam) respectively and the image you get is of a socially segregated country where children living in the capital are being disproportionately damaged by poverty and inequality.”

The disgusting and inhumane treatment of residents in Grenfell Tower five years later suggests that inequality, despite Davidson’s puerile Pollyanna prose, is a serious problem in modern, affluent Britain. And as the inequality has become embedded in British society the indifference in the face of it by Tories such as Davidson has also increased.

In Scotland, more than 260,000 children are living in varying degrees of poverty while the sanctions of the DWP, urged on by Ms Davidson and her party, have driven thousands more to use food banks as a means of providing for their families. Davidson also thinks it’s a good idea to question the victims of rape about the details of their violation before permitting them to claim benefits for a third child. Not even the Victorians in Charles Dickens’ Britain could have dreamt that one up.

Davidson is being touted as a serious contender for the leadership of her party as the Tory wolves begin to gather around Theresa May. Her essay should at least get her an interview. On the plus side though, there was no mention of that “nasty and divisive” second referendum. But we’re never more than a few days away from the next one. I’m told that air pollution in Kathmandu is reaching epidemic proportions. That can only have been caused by one thing and one thing only: altogether now …