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

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.

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.

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:

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?