I am greatly honoured and privileged to be accepted as a candidate for Reform UK Scotland.

I’ve been politically homeless for a while now; the great campaign for Brexit was won, so what next? I tried being a Tory for a while, but Theresa May swiftly changed my mind, and Boris has done nothing to change it back.

Labour was desperate under Corbyn and hasn’t changed under former DPP Starmer. Identity politics seems to be the obsession of the left; authoritarianism that of the right, although more and more the differences between the parties appear to a matter of style rather than substance.

The Lords is an anti-democratic bad joke, The Commons is being hollowed out by lobby-fodder MPs incapable of thinking or themselves; Holyrood has forgotten, if it ever knew, what democracy actually is.

Which begs the question, why would anyone want to run for elected office? After all, you’re going to get “slandered, libelled, hear words you’ve never heard in the Bible”, you’re going to be gone over by a hostile media that objects to everything you stand for, and you’re putting yourself up for abuse from every person with a grievance. Why would you do that?

For one reason. This country is a mess. It’s a mess caused by political ideologues devoid of any interest in its people, and determined to secede from this United Kingdom by any means possible. The SNP, a party I have to confess I loathe, have had 14 years holding the reins of power in Scotland.

Nicola Sturgeon has said she wants to be judged on her record. Okay, let’s do that.

Education: failure

Health: failure

Infrastructure: failure

Fishing: failure

Farming: failure

Energy: failure

In fact the only things Sturgeon and the SNP have been good at is dividing our country, turning us against each other, and blaming Westminster when anything goes wrong (as it does constantly under these shysters).

And then there’s Covid, a monumental failure by the SNP in Scotland, by Labour in Wales and by the Conservatives in Westminster. The incompetence and authoritarianism exhibited by all the big parties has brought me to the point where I have to take a stand. I am tired of the constant moving of goalposts; fed up with being told where I can shop and who I can meet, utterly sick to death of being forced to wear a facemask that doesn’t work anyway.

We were told ‘three weeks to flatten the curve’, which somehow morphed and kept morphing into a year of arrest in our own homes, a ‘voluntary’ ‘vaccine’ rollout which has somehow become mandatory, and now they talk of mandatory documentation to ‘prove you are covid–free’.

The measures taken by governments across the UK, and indeed the Western world, have been economically disastrous, scientifically illiterate and brutally tyrannical. The police are assaulting citizens for no reason than not wearing a facemask, and dragging people to prison for protesting about it.

CS Lewis wrote ’Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.’ Ain’t that the truth?

He also wrote in the same paragraph that ’Those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.’ And he was right – they will never stop.

But it has to end, and it has to end now.

And the only party – The Only Party – which has consistently stood against this tyranny is Reform UK.

So I’m running for Reform UK, because someone has to take a stand against the madness.

And if you want to take a stand, if you believe that enough is enough, then you should lend me your vote.

Alan Meliville