THE great American journalist and author Robert Caro wrote perhaps the greatest modern treatise on the true source of political power and how it’s deployed. Every page of his Pultizer-winning biography of Robert Moses, the New York planner who, despite never having been elected to public office, was appointed head of 12 city departments speaks truth to power.

Moses was chiefly responsible for modern New York’s physical infrastructure, specialising in bridges and public highways which he built at an astonishing rate. He has long been considered America’s most influential city planner.

Robert Caro’s biography, though, details the human toll that stemmed from Moses’ grand metropolitan designs. Entire communities, mainly poor, black and Hispanic were considered to be expendable and uprooted from their neighbourhoods to make way for Moses’ vision. It was little more than social cleansing on the grand scale and happened at a time when these people were voiceless and excluded from the processes which determined every aspect of their lives.

Something of what happened to New York’s huddled masses was experienced by the working-class community in the Anderston district of Glasgow as it was bulldozed to make way for the M8 motorway. It was present in the construction of the M77 which destroyed hundreds of acres of green spaces – the lungs of working class neighbourhoods in south Pollok – so that affluent commuters from Newton Mearns could cut 10 or 15 minutes off their journey time into the city.

And it happened when Glasgow City Council effectively issued a wrecking order on the homes of working-class families to make way for the 2014 Commonwealth Games. Bread and circuses were the Romans’ most enduring political legacy.

In the next year or so, tens of thousands of families like these will be menaced beyond their capabilities by a perfect storm of iniquities which governments have known was coming for more than two years now, but claim to be powerless to prevent.

These families know that while their energy bills will push 70% of them into fuel poverty the big five energy firms have raked in tens of billions in profits. This covers a period when we were being told that everyone was having to tighten their belts and cut their cloth more finely.

During this time we also discovered that record numbers of billionaires had been created during (and often as a result of) the global health emergency; many of them through disaster capitalism. These vultures were literally preying on sickness and death, confident that the UK Government would never tax them on their Covid gains.

Those who kept the lights on and the streets safe, maintaining lifelines to the vulnerable and the fragile, did so while bashfully accepting our doorstep cheers. But when they asked for a modest increase in wages hollowed out by inflation they were scorned as greedy Marxists.

Yet there was never any scrutiny of the massive pay increases for executives or the profits of formerly nationalised industries flowing into the pockets of global investors. These workers had no one to advocate for them in any of the realms where power in this country is dispensed.

Having been stripped of all else – money, power, influence, advocacy – loud protest is the only means by which these people can be heard. And when the two Conservative Party leadership candidates favoured Scotland with one fleeting visit this week, loud protest was what they faced.

What else did they expect? This pair and their fawning press glove puppets have since scarcely been able to conceal their glee at the ‘ugly’ scenes in Perth on Tuesday night which comprised a rude banner; a few hurled imprecations and a rather unpleasant chap accusing James Cook, the BBC political editor, of being a traitor. Scotland’s political and media elites had waited eight years to get the old recriminations back together. In that time, it seems, they’ve been nursing their wrath to keep it warm.

From footage of the protests you might conclude that it all looked predictably gnarly and maybe something of an ordeal for the inoffensive Mr Cook, a lovely chap by all accounts. But you’d be wrong. This was an apocalyptic event which – if it were repeated – might require the intervention of UN Peacekeepers. In an unprecedented development, Police Scotland are being urged to investigate and hunt down a delinquent banner. What are they going to do? Give it a restraining order?

A familiar and odious cast of characters jostled to express the keenest outrage. Some journalists bravely showed solidarity with their stricken BBC colleague – bless – for sustaining life-changing injuries by insults.

Assorted Better Together characters reformed their survivors' group after the traumas they suffered in the 2014 Armageddon. This was the true face of nationalism, they all said, because ... well, there were some saltires.

And then there was Nicola Sturgeon taking time out from her busy Festival Fringe programme telling us that these wicked protesters weren’t speaking in her name. Of course they weren’t, for then they’d have had to have found a stage and an audience of festival fluffers in some tented venue.

In the absence of any meaningful political or social achievement in the most self-indulgent and ornamental tenure of any UK political leader, Sturgeon lives for these contrived opportunities and grasps them.

James Cook isn’t a traitor and he’ll soon recover from his ‘ordeal’. But there was treachery afoot here. Not of Scotland and its sovereignty, but of an entire class who have been left defenceless in the face of a sustained attack by this most corrupt and extreme of right-wing governments.

Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss were senior ministers in a government which operated a mafiosi, get-rich-quick enterprise while thousands died of Covid. They have assisted in a suite of punitive and racist measures against migrants and have steadfastly refused to help our poorest communities survive the oncoming economic apocalypse.

Consequently, they faced a few bad-mannered banners and a smattering of profanities. And only now do the politicians and their media glove-puppets want to declare a state of emergency.