Thinking in politic rather than purist terms, Westminster, to which constitutional affairs are reserved, should now call Alex Salmond's bluff and legislate for a Scottish independence referendum immediately. How could he possibly object? And we all know what the result would be. Westminster and Holyrood results have never had any apparent effect on each other, so Ed Miliband can sleep easy.
Off went the BBC about how Labour had run Scotland ever since the reign of Robert the Bruce or something. It is utter rubbish. The Tories are the only party ever to have taken more than half of the vote there, and they were running even Glasgow City Council into the Seventies. Labour is not, and has never been, as popular in Scotland as in either the North East or the North West of England. I say again that Labour has never won half the vote in Scotland. Nor has it ever won more than two thirds of Scotland's seats at Westminster, despite the use of First Past The Post. Auntie's attempt to claim that the Labour Party was founded in Scotland is downright bizarre.
Labour's strong showing elsewhere can give no pleasure to almost anyone in the media, since even those who think of themselves as the party's sympathisers should ponder that Trish Law would not have retired from her Welsh Assembly seat if the Labour Leadership had gone to their preferred candidate, by whose name the BBC now refers to, and even addresses, the successful candidate as a matter of policy. Like the whole of Fleet Street, the Beeb has to present a gain of 26 councils and 800 councillors as a disaster, in the way that Auntie used to depict Conservative victories at the height of Blairism.
Martha Kearney, for example, is so pig ignorant of the North that she can, in a single sentence, report the Lib Dems' loss of control of a city council while describing that city, without qualification, as "a Labour heartland". The strange fantasy is once again being put about that General Elections are won and lost in the South East, which overwhelmingly returned Conservative MPs in 2005, an Election which Labour won comfortably. But it would not have mattered if Labour had won every council seat up for grabs in the South East. We are back in the Neil Kinnock years, when the tribally Tory papers and the ideologically proto-Blairite broadcasters alike simply refused Labour any sort of hearing.
On which note, David Blunkett's remark alone would easily be enough to have the AV referendum result struck down in court. And it was hardly unique. With relations between the media and the judiciary not exactly at their best even by the standards of these things, this might even be the chance to have outrageously biased, mendacious coverage recognised as spending by the side, party or candidate thus favoured.
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Perhaps we don’t agree over Salmond, but it is nice to read someone who realises that Scotland is not just a tartan appendix to Merseyside.
ReplyDeleteUltimately I think Scottish Labour’s biggest fault was not taking advantage of the utterly dismal performance by Lib Dems and Tories. I thought they did pretty well overall, given how feeble their campaign was. In the Highlands the Dems were furious that the electorate were given another party to vote for who weren’t Labour or Tory. After the coalition, none of the main UK parties were going to get any candidates elected north-west of Moray.
Still, the urban south voted in large numbers for labour and will probably return at the general election. The Tories (who actually possibly have the allegiance of most Scottish print media) were utterly defeated in the Eastern Lowlands. This region is possibly more ‘British’ than anywhere in England. It includes regions inhabited by that most archetypal of Tory voters, the airforce officer. Still failed. They managed to keep a grip on the borders regions; can’t claim to know much about that area of Scotland.
However, on the national level, I do think that the Tories had a decisive victory given the savagery of their economic agenda and their numerous blunders. Whilst I agree there is hypocrisy in the media which would probably be applauding David Miliband if he got the same result, if England was opposed to plutocracy the results would have been very different. I think that it does raise questions as to whether there really is any appetite for social democracy or voting reform in England.
Incidentally, I was reading that Gordon Brown was campaigning for Labour in Scotland. Wonder why beloved Blair who supposedly single-handedly took Labour to repeated election victory wasn’t out? Was he too busy making speeches about how wonderful he is on the other side of the Atlantic or something?
Here we go again with David Lindsay, white knight of the blogosphere, scourge of biased media insiders. It is BOLLOCKS!!! Forget the loss of the Telegraph blog, no ordinary blogger would ever have been offered it in the first place and the unpaid editor who lost him that unpaid post has since been sacked from his day job as the Catholic Hard Right swung into action. Personal criticism of him on Coffee House is either taken down immediately or never allowed up. Forget comments on Comment is Free or Pat Buchanan’s American Conservative, Lindsay has written above the CiF line at least once and above the TAC line on numerous occasions. Few people read TAC but the ones who do include a high proportion of Congress members, Congressional staffers and US intelligence operatives. He is as big as that.
ReplyDeleteNormal bloggers do not do the job full time, collating provincial and specialist material from all over the world. Not even ones with PayPal buttons. Yeah, right, he lives on that and the tiny stipend for college tutoring. He has barely worked but lives in a house that must be worth half a million IN CO. DURHAM, 2 or 3 million by South-East standards. He dresses like a duke and talks like a duchess. He is the only person listed as “Academic/management staff”, tutors do not get it routinely, in the online directory of the spookiest university in Britain, he openly looks down on MI5 for being common. His dad was an archdeacon, the other side of his family in St. Helena have gongs coming out of their ears for loyal colonial service, he was a governor of two schools when he was still a student, a full time member of university teaching staff was removed to give him one of those places. Most of Lindsay’s readers are in politics or the media, including many at the very highest levels. He’ll pretend not to know that, being a simple Northern boy and all. Don’t believe a word of it.
His mate Neil Clark complains about “uber-bloggers” while getting the commissions they can’t for CiF, the First Post, the American Conservative, the Australian, the Times, the Express, the Mail on Sunday. He should know, but not as much as David Lindsay. They don’t come any more uber than him, that classic British type, the consummate upper middle class insider who pretends to be a rebel champion of the common man. That allows the Establishment to pretend to be giving the plebs a voice because they give a voice to him. Bollocks. Utter, utter, utter BOLLOCKS!!!
Please do not swear on my blog.
ReplyDeleteAnonymous, Neil Clark's democratic credentials are no longer to be sniffed at. Now a member of the Vale of the White Horse Parish Council, he came top in last Thursday's election gaining an incredible 671 votes (6.06%). See: http://www.southoxon.gov.uk/java/support/Main.jsp?MODULE=ElectionResultsParish&NAME=North Hinksey
ReplyDeleteAlas, Neil lost in the other election he was contesting, the District Council election for North Hinksey and Wytham ward: http://www.oxfordmail.co.uk/news/elections_2011/constituency/198/
What a shame he had to stand as an independent in both cases. If he had been able to stand as a candidate of the recently revived British People's Alliance, he might have won both elections!
Good grief. I have seen the zapruder film many times but I never thought that I would see in words a neocon head explode in such a fashion. Is Neil in MI5 too?
ReplyDeleteKBO, David.
Thank God, I thought I was he only one. Phillip Blond may have 650 friends on Facebook but he shares about a fifth of them with his friend David Lindsay, this is no casual acquaintance online. Maurice Glasman only has 90 but David Lindsay is one them. A simple country boy and enemy of the Establishment my arse. I had never thought of the fact that no one who was just an ordinary blogger would have been offered a Telegraph blog to begin with but obviously you are right, they wouldn't have been and David Lindsay isn't.
ReplyDeletePlease do not swear on my blog.
ReplyDeleteMartin, depend on it.
Charles Marsh, of course Neil got onto the Parish if he put up for the District on the same day. Never fails. If you had ever been politically active in the real world, then you would know that trick.
Call it the Catholic Hard Right if you want, but look what happened when David Lindsay and Gerald Warner disappeared from their unpaid Telegraph blogs leaving only Mabel's Boys to hold the "Catholic" line.
ReplyDeleteMabel soon afterwards disappeared from her very well paid job as Editor in Chief of the newspaper preferred by conservative Catholics. She is a bit nouveau as much as anything else, nobody could accuse either of them of that: wheels within wheels.
Ed West may be many things, but he is certainly not one of "Mabel's Boys"...
ReplyDeleteNow, on topic, please.
As we change the political and media weather in the face of Lear-like neocon ranting, Dr Meenagh is one of the most important people to have on board.
ReplyDeleteIndeed he is.
ReplyDeleteThose of us who follow David on this side of the Atlantic really need to get him more involved. I for one will be making representations at next week's convention to get him invited to national headquarters before November. David, we need you and so does America
ReplyDelete