Category Archives: Scotland

Gordon Constituency Electoral Calculus

A letter from Justine

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Well I got a nice wee surprise when I got in from work, a lovely letter from the Liberal Democrat Prospective Parliamentary Candidate (PPC) for the constituency of Gordon; Christine Jardine, or Justine to her boss.

I won’t bother talking about the first part of the letter, it was all SNP bashing anyway. What is it with these unionist parties? Why can’t they give us a positive vision of the UK? It all seems to be SNP BAD. Is that really the message that the Liberal Democrats want to send to the electorate?

Justine's Letter

Justine’s Letter

Anyway enough of the SNP doom porn, let’s take a look at the interesting bit at the bottom of the letter. Let’s deal with the PS first, pedants among you will probably say that there is a full stop missing after the “P” but I’m not going there. The message is that there are only 2 candidates running in Gordon. That is a LIE! There are 5 candidates standing so there is more choice than they are letting on. I know, I know. Picky, picky. But it’s important to get the finer points of your message right isn’t it? Otherwise how can people believe the rest of the message?

Then we get some more SNP BAD with the message that they “took their eye off the ball on local services”, but local services are devolved and this is a UK General Election. The local services that are being talked about are run by Aberdeenshire Council for the most part with a part of the constituency being located within Aberdeen City Council area. Just for the record Aberdeenshire Council is run by a coalition of Conservative and…Liberal Democrats! That’s right, Justine is highlighting the failings of her own colleagues. Aberdeen City Council is run by a coalition of Conservative and Labour, the makings of a grand coalition perhaps?

Then we get to the 2 horse race bit, here is what the people at Electoral Calculus think about Gordon Constituency.

Gordon Constituency Electoral Calculus

Gordon Constituency Electoral Calculus

Not exactly a 2 horse race is it? But we’ll let that one slide.

Then we get to the small print, handily resized for ease of reading (it’s for me really, as my auld mither says, “Auld age, it disnae come alone.”) Apologies for the scanner failure.

Justine Letter Small Print

Justine Letter Small Print

We can see that the letter is printed in London, a quick search of Google (other search engines are available) yields lots of local printers which could have been used to print the letter. Justine takes local money and spends it in London. That’s a familiar theme…

Then there is the “Gordon Liberal Democrats”, a quick search of the registered political parties at the Electoral Commission yields no results. They don’t exist. Then there is the biggest lie on the page:

"Scottish" Liberal Democrats Logo

“Scottish” Liberal Democrats Logo

Can you guess what it is yet? That’s right, there is NO SUCH PARTY! They are trying to fool the electorate into believing that the party is local. But it’s a London party, for London people.

It’s a party which enabled the worst ravages of the Tories over the last five years. A party which abandoned its solemn pledge on tuition fees just so that they could cruise around London in ministerial cars. Malcolm Bruce, the previous incumbent (for 31 years) voted with the tories for the increase in tuition fees, voted with the tories for the bedroom tax, voted with the tories for the benefits cap, voted with the tories for increasing VAT, voted with the tories against the top rate of income tax, voted with the tories against the banker’s bonus tax. He was, for all intents and purposes, a tory. Why would anyone vote for that?

Quisling scum

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Did you see it? You could hardly miss it. Some graffiti was sprayed onto the Conservative and Unionist Party office and Labour Party office in Aberdeen sometime on Friday night. The perpetrators sprayed a nazi symbol (the wrong way round) with the word “scum” above on a window and a large letter “Q”, allegedly representing the word “Quisling”, on the door of the tory office on West Mount Street. The Labour party office got a “Q” sprayed on its’ door. Here’s what local tory councillor Ross Thomson had to say about it on Twitter:

Graffitti on Tory Office

Graffiti on Tory Office (Picture courtesy of Cllr Ross Thomson)

This was immediately picked up by the unionist press, with the P&J being one of the first out of the blocks. They provided a space for the esteemed councillor to air his views unchallenged. He said, “It shows the ugly side of nationalism and it is really sad to see this happen in Aberdeen.” Now the councillor is entitled to his opinion, but to immediately blame “nationalists” is going too far. Does he have proof? If so the culprits would be caught by now, wouldn’t they?

Once they were caught we would expect to see them on the front page of every unionist media outlet in the land (that’s most of them). We would expect the book to be thrown at them very hard, wouldn’t we?

But I reckon the culprits will never be caught. Why? Cui bono: who benefits? The councillor certainly benefited from lots of unopposed air time. The Tories and Labour benefited by making the nationalists look bad. The press benefited by selling lots of copy and getting more page views. The whole unionist cause benefited. In fact the only people not to benefit are the nationalists. Fancy that?

Wheelie Bins for Yes

Referendum Recollections

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According to the unionist press the dream of independence split the nation. Is this true? In a way I suppose it could be said that it was. Some voted that Scotland should be an independent country while others voted to remain under the heel of the Westminster system. Indeed the September 18th result was obviously the focal point for the British Nationalists, as was demonstrated by the George Square Riots.

After a day of being a sovereign country, we were returned to colonial rule. This begs the question of who was really trying to divide Scotland and whether they were successful? Was it the positive and inclusive grassroots YES campaign organised by the people of Scotland? Or was it the AstroTurf Project Fear; a scare and intimidation campaign run and funded by a Westminster government who became increasingly desperate to hold onto the revenues from our nation in order to prevent the inevitable bankruptcy of the rest of the UK.

For the people of Scotland I believe the lead up to the big day was actually way more important. Far from the hatred and division portrayed in the unionist controlled main stream media the residents of this country actually experienced a reawakening of a sense of community and compassion. For perhaps the first time in their lives the voiceless had a voice and the nation was gifted with a sense of hope.

Contrary to the reports of violent division before and since September, my personal experience was, and indeed continues to be, that of a coming together of people from diverse backgrounds. It has become irrelevant which social class you come from, what race or religion you happen to belong to, which sex you are, or even which country you were born in. People came together then and continue to work for a common cause. Perhaps for the first time politics was being openly discussed in homes, workplaces, pubs and public meetings the length and breadth of the land.

New phrases, such as social justice, flooded social media sites. People who had previously been unaware of just how large the gaps between the well off and the poor had become joined forces to attempt to redress the balance. Food banks became headline news and the levels of poverty, which had been at best ignored and at worst deliberately hidden, were thrust into the spotlight. The people were coming together to help those most in need in our society and continue to do so.

Divisive? That’s a matter of opinion. I have made a lot of new friends through the YES campaign, both on social media and also locally, nationally and worldwide. People I would never have met or interacted with if not for the referendum. I am not alone in this as the sense of inclusion is repeated hundreds, if not thousands, of times over in Scotland and around the globe as many looked on and stood with us in anticipation of the triumph of hope over fear.

Alastair G Rennie (Wheelie Bins for Yes)

Trolls are bad politics

A troll’s a troll fur a’ that.

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Poor wee Dougal Alexander, he was hayin a guid moan at the £100 per head Labour List Conference at Dartmouth House in Mayfair this week. That’s 15.4 hours work at the minimum wage for a half day conference. I guess they weren’t wanting any of those working class types turning up and lowering the tone. No, this event was purely for the Labour Party elite to address a compliant press and didn’t Dougal do well? He got a piece in The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Drum, Huffington Post, The Spectator and Politics.co.uk.

What Dougal was moaning about was that it is “getting harder for politicians to campaign in elections because of conspiracy theories on social media.” As most people realise, what he really meant was that it is getting harder for politicians to lie during election campaigns because the collective minds of the internet users, facilitated by social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, quickly expose those lies and broadcast them around the planet at lightning speed. Of course there wouldn’t be an issue if the politicians told the truth, but lets follow Dougal’s thread.

He continued that because of social media we are confronting “a politics where people’s social media feeds can be an echo chamber for, at best, their own opinions and, at worst, their own prejudices.” So there are NO FACTS on anyones’ Twitter or Facebook (unless they’re Labour facts of course). There are only rumours, opinions and prejudices.

Let’s look at some facts then. During the independence referendum we were subjected to a relentless stream of “news”, almost all of it against the concept of independence. This stream was delivered to our living rooms by the likes of the BBC, STV and almost all newspapers. It is remarkable that anyone voted for the idea at all and the main reason for that was the 5th estate: social media, independent websites and blogs. Now that the referendum is over the fifth estate has turned its attention to the general election.

It is an amazing thing this 5th estate. It is a collective, a hive mind, ever watchful. Always scrutinising all of the output from “traditional” media. Dissecting and analysing the words and meanings of every politicians’ speech and press release. Debating politics in real-time in cyberspace. Organising and protesting, even driving the political agenda.

This is the politics of the people in its rawest, purest form. It is a very powerful thing which is making the establishment scared. That is the real meaning of Dougal’s speech: Labour and the establishment is scared of the power of the 5th estate. So they will try to spread that fear and use it to their advantage and they will use the “traditional” media to do it.

Barely a week goes by without some “vile cybernat” or “troll” headlines. The normal pattern is like this:

  1. Someone posts a derogatory, slanderous or ill-advised comment on a well-known person’s timeline
  2. This is picked up by all of the users of the site and spread far and wide, almost instantly
  3. The “traditional” media make political hay. Favourite adjectives are vile, disgusting and hateful

It is VERY easy to become a troll: a couple of sherberts, then typing what you think and pressing the post button without checking what you are saying first. Boom. Trollmageddon. We have been there with some ill-advised comments and the reaction is not nice. Apologies are not necessarily printed alongside the offending item.

But a far bigger problem is the damage that it does to our cause. The “traditional” media have a field day over it. They paint every independence supporter as some kind of sub-human Neanderthal and they always insinuate, rightly or wrongly, that the trolls are SNP members or supporters.

What we have to remember is that not everyone is connected to our 5th estate. There are whole generations of voters who only receive their politics from the “traditional” media. If all they receive about the independence movement are a load of “vile, disgusting cybernat” stories then that is what they will think about us.

“So what?” I hear some people say. We need these people if we are ever to achieve our dream, for in their midst there are soft unionists. People who we may be able to persuade that independence is indeed the natural state for our nation. We will never achieve that if we allow the “traditional” media to influence them with a few ill-considered comments. Let’s try not to give them any more ammunition.