IT’S the Sellafield method. If your "brand" becomes so contaminated that it’s never going to recover, just change the name.
Thus Windscale became Sellafield. (The site’s owners will tell you that Sellafield and Windscale are different parts of the operation, and the sight of thousands of gallons of milk being poured down the drain after the 1957 Windscale fire had nothing at all to do with the apparent name change. Believe that if you will.)
And now the Tories are at it. Or, at least, the prospective Tory leader in Scotland, Inverness’ very own Murdo Fraser, is.
He says that "Conservative" is a toxic brand. You don’t say.
Last Sunday his solution was clear. If elected Scottish Conservative leader, he’d abolish the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party and start a new right-wing party, name yet to be decided.
By Monday night, by which time the Scottish Conservatives’ main funder had pledged not to fund Fraser’s new party and to continue to fund the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party instead, the plans had mysteriously changed; he’d keep the party going and only change its name. If the name didn’t change, he insisted, the party had "no future".
Well I’ll drink to that.
Of course, Murdo Fraser is completely missing the point.
In Scotland the Conservative Party is, indeed, a toxic brand. But it’s not the name that’s toxic, it’s the policies.
In particular, it’s the memory of the reviled figure of Margaret Thatcher and the (quite correct) belief that her appalling, divisive policies live on in her political spawn that has sounded the death knell for the Tories in Scotland.
And no-one is a more sycophantic Thatcherite than Murdo Fraser. It was worship of his political heroine that got Murdo Fraser into politics in the first place.
He thinks Thatcher "transformed Britain generally for the better". For the vast majority of Scots she unquestionably transformed Britain, but most certainly not for the better.
Murdo Fraser believes in all that Thatcher believed in.
He believes in liberty. Well, don’t we all? The problem is that the Thatcherite version of liberty is purely for those who can afford it. The Thatcher philosophy certainly didn’t believe in the liberty to go on strike to defend your livelihood. It did believe in the liberty to make it much easier for employers to reduce wages and sack workers.
Like Thatcher, Murdo Fraser believes in smaller government. Sounds nice, doesn’t it? The problem is that smaller government means fewer of the public services we depend on. It means the private sector providing far more and creaming off the profits.
He thinks society works better without politicians trying to tell everyone what to do. Well, that sounds fine too. But what, exactly, does he mean by that?
We should remember that politicians are there, elected on our behalf, to do exactly that and to bring in legislation to ensure that people do what they’re told, be that to stop smoking in public places, or to wear seat belts in cars.
Fraser is on record as believing society works best where people are given freedom to live their own lives without too much interference from the Government whether it’s in terms of levels of taxation or social policy. That means that the rich pay less. It means that the government doesn’t care whether you drive a gas-guzzler or not. It means that the government doesn’t provide social housing and homelessness simply grows. It means that the rich thrive while those who are poor, or down on their luck, are thrown to the dogs.
It is the values of the Conservative Party, not their name, that mean the party has no future in Scotland.
The irony that Murdo Fraser wants his party to break away from the UK party, while vociferously opposing any notion that Scotland should break away from the UK, has not been lost either.
And so it’s game on. As an ardent opponent of the Conservatives, I’m almost tempted to join the party just to vote for the hapless Murdo Fraser. The Conservative Party in Scotland will be hopelessly split if he wins. And that can only be good news for the rest of us.
