GROWING up in working class Glenrothes in the 1980s, I knew only one Tory: my father. Ross Taylor’s political views had been formed as a boy brought up to respect Mr Churchill during the war, and in the 1950s, when ordinary protestant Glaswegian families like his routinely voted Conservative.

During the miner’s strike of 1984-85 I remember my parents arguing: Mum was behind the miners, while Dad, who grafted 12-hour shifts in a trolley factory, thought they should get off their backsides and back to work. To say this was a controversial viewpoint in a community where a big proportion of the men worked in mines and Labour could have put up the proverbial monkey in a red rosette, is an understatement.

To top it all, Dad loved Margaret Thatcher. We were among the first families in our street to buy our council house (it turned out my mother, Labour through and through, liked this particular Tory policy too). At the heart of my father’s Conservatism was a strongly held belief in personal responsibility. He worked a low-skilled job he hated for 18 before he died because he saw it as his responsibility - and his alone - to look after his family. In his eyes relying on the state marked you out as a failure. He had little time for our neighbours on “the broo” who said they couldn’t find jobs.

In so many ways Dad was your typical working class Tory. And despite thinking differently on many issues I can understand the motivations and social history that led him and millions of other working class people to vote Tory in the past. I can comprehend their worldview.

What I struggle to understand, however, is the motivation driving today’s working class Tories, a group of voters currently all over the news. In Scotland they apparently delivered second place to the Conservatives in the local elections and will, if some polls are to be believed, hand the party up to 12 seats in the forthcoming General Election. In England, meanwhile, they’re about to give Theresa May her party’s biggest majority since the height of Thatcher’s reign.

If ever there was a case of turkeys voting for Christmas, however, this is surely it. Do working class people, even those who feel strongly that Scotland should remain part of the UK, honestly believe a hard Brexit will be anything other than disastrous for them? Do they really think cutting immigration from the EU will deliver wealth and prosperity to their broken communities, many of which were decimated by the Tory policies of the 1980s?

The reality of the hard Brexit so many Tory voters are keen to either ignore or condone is that it will likely require not only years of further austerity, wage freezes, cuts to benefits - this is already being strongly hinted at by the Chancellor - but may well be used as an excuse to slash many of the progressive employment laws demanded by EU membership. Many more zero-hours contracts - or worse - will follow.

And no matter what nonsense Theresa May spouts about great trade deals with the EU, when Brexit really starts to bite the economy will tank. And who suffers most when this happens, as we saw in the 2008 crash? The very people apparently so keen to give Mrs May her mandate, of course.

The PM is savvy. Only yesterday she trumpeted changing the law to give councils and housing associations in England the go-ahead to build hundreds of thousands of new homes for social rent, laughably ignoring the fact her party caused the country’s housing crisis in the first place.

The arrogance is mind-boggling. But clearly it is also strangely appealing to the very people who stand to lose most if the Tories win big. It’s time they woke up from this Stockholm Syndrome nightmare before sleep walking into further disaster. I don't think even my father would have voted Tory now.