Last night was pretty disappointing; there's no point in denying that.
Baillieston didn't manage to inspire Obama-esqe queues at polling stations. Turnout was only 20.9%. Full results are available on the Council website. I got the feeling that people just weren't that enthused at the idea of going out on a cold dreich night to vote. They got home from work, shut the curtains, settled down in front of the tv and stayed in for the night. Several people I spoke to were ill or looking after their kids, regretfully telling me they couldn't make it to the polls this time. Dark wintry nights are definately a factor, and I recall similar difficulties in a by-election in Renfrewshire a few years ago. It's far easier to encourage people out when it's sunny.
We put a lot of effort into Glenrothes, as you will have seen from my previous posts. Our vote increased, which is always encouraging. I got good, enthusiastic responses from voters. However, there were also places where the people were reticent, where doors went unanswered and clearly Labour managed to prevail.
I really object to references to 'defeat' - Labour had a 10,000 majority in this seat. That does not make them underdogs, it makes them front - runners. Glenrothes was simply a Labour hold, not a win.
Where our campaign was positive, theirs was crushingly negative. Scaremongering, and concentration on non-Westminster issues. People will be disappointed when Lindsay Roy fails to deliver on any of the issues he campaigned on - schools investment, anti social behaviour, and yes, even care charges. As an MP, these are right out of his remit.
I'm hoping to manage through the day without too many hefty sighs. This too will pass.
Baillieston didn't manage to inspire Obama-esqe queues at polling stations. Turnout was only 20.9%. Full results are available on the Council website. I got the feeling that people just weren't that enthused at the idea of going out on a cold dreich night to vote. They got home from work, shut the curtains, settled down in front of the tv and stayed in for the night. Several people I spoke to were ill or looking after their kids, regretfully telling me they couldn't make it to the polls this time. Dark wintry nights are definately a factor, and I recall similar difficulties in a by-election in Renfrewshire a few years ago. It's far easier to encourage people out when it's sunny.
We put a lot of effort into Glenrothes, as you will have seen from my previous posts. Our vote increased, which is always encouraging. I got good, enthusiastic responses from voters. However, there were also places where the people were reticent, where doors went unanswered and clearly Labour managed to prevail.
I really object to references to 'defeat' - Labour had a 10,000 majority in this seat. That does not make them underdogs, it makes them front - runners. Glenrothes was simply a Labour hold, not a win.
Where our campaign was positive, theirs was crushingly negative. Scaremongering, and concentration on non-Westminster issues. People will be disappointed when Lindsay Roy fails to deliver on any of the issues he campaigned on - schools investment, anti social behaviour, and yes, even care charges. As an MP, these are right out of his remit.
I'm hoping to manage through the day without too many hefty sighs. This too will pass.
14 comments:
Glenrothes was simply a Labour hold, not a win.
- Well said BB.
The BBC certainly seem very relieved New Labour won in Glenrothes -
Labour victorious in Glenrothes
BBC Scotland
07 Nov 2008
Other BBC headlines seem just as triumphalist.
You win some, and you lose some - but as you say BB, the SNP are positive and have lots of great policies which people actually want themselves.
all the best!
ps
I always visit your blog whenever I'm on the internet (same with IndyGal and 'Adam Smith Was a Socialist'), though I don't think I've ever left a comment.
I hail from sunny North Lanarkshire, just to let you know.
Chin up! There's always the next one . . .
I'm talking about Labour's Goldilocks by election on my blog. See what you think at
http://truthaboutscotland.blogspot.com/
I did meant to say BB,
that with the whole of the British Establishment against the SNP and the pro-British corporate news media, the performance of the SNP has been quite brilliant.
As an hardworking SNP member, give yourself a big pat on the back!
As I was just saying over at -
The Scottish Patient
- imagine how New Labour would be faring without the support it gets from foreigners such as Rupert Murdoch and their poodle the BBC.
The SNP would wipe them out!
all the best!
ps
It's a good blog you got there michael!
Thanks for your comments guys, and your encouragement joe90. The media is a huge problem, especially now the Herald appears to be contracting from being a national to a Glasgow paper.
Michael, I've added you to my blogroll!
Shame it didn't all go to plan last night :) I think the honeymoon has well and truely ended and the SNP will be shown for what they are both in Holyrood and in Glasgow - all words and no action!
I think the honeymoon has well and truely ended...
- What honeymoon?
The SNP have never been supported by the British corporate news media.
Unlike New Labour, which had to become more Thatcherite than the Tories, and more neo-con than Bush and the American neo-cons, to get the support of the corporate news media.
The fact is, New Labour keeps quiet about their far-right Thatcherite policies. They keep their leaders away from by-elections they're so despised by the general public.
New Labour keeps quiet about their involvement in war crimes against Iraq, Afghanistan, Occupied Palestine and Lebanon.
However, the best of New Labour's time in government is yet to come.
Home re-possessions and buisnesses are starting to fail, unemployment going up to c.3 million and New Labour handing over 100's of billions of taxpayers money, in corporate welfare state payments, to failed banks and spiv financiers.
With the likes of PFI, student debt, the house price bubble bursting etc - the British public have never been so much up to their ears in private and public debt.
The SNP and its supposed honeymoon period is as funny as gloating over Glenrothes before all New Labour's debt crunch and phoney 'boom' economy pigeons have come home to roost.
What honeymoon?
Perhaps the one which Alex Salmond yesterday acknowledged, when he said: “I hope to extend the honeymoon a bit yet”, claiming that he had had “virtually untrammelled political success for 18 months” but admitting that “nothing in political life continues in that vein forever”.
Yes but what honeymoon and with who exactly?
The SNP are hated, not loved by the Unionist media.
The only 'honeymoon' that is being refered to, unionist, is the one where Scottish voters see through the tissue of lies by New Labour and its foreign supporters in the British corporate news media.
As Alex Salmond says, the 'honeymoon' is dependent on the SNP themselves - against the lies and propaganda of the British establishment, its poodles in the BBC and the American neo-con lickespittles and war criminals of New Labour.
Okay then, lets just forgot for the past year and a half the Scottish Media haven't treated Salmon as the Golden Boy of Scotland. I just hope to God that you people don't ever get your way - people like Thewliss and McDonald don't know how to be good Councillors never mind run the country - and to think David McDonald is a Baillie, God help us all.
I think that the SNP missed a trick on the local issues - they dominated, not the national stuff - a rare misstep by Salmond, given that he was, reasonably rightly, trying to trumpet that the SNP government hadn't been the disaster that was promised by Labour in the runup to the main election. That narrative frame would work well at a general, or in a built up area that's much more closely connected to national issues, but all politics is local - especially in a community like Fife. Right narrative, wrong frame - it just didn't mesh with people. The local care charges stuff from Labour was spot on, and SNP were relatively slow to respond it.
#the people were reticent,
#where doors went unanswered
#and clearly Labour managed to prevail
You make it sound like the Dark Side! Come on, we're lovely really, we've got a cute wee rose for a logo :)
I notice 'scottish unionist' has the most important flag of all missing from his blog icon, the US flag.
After all the US are the one's in charge of Britian's foreign policy, especially new Labour's, amongst much else.
james burns
sorry to sound a bit malicious mate,
but is that an English red rose you have for your party logo or what?
:-)
all the best!
BB,
have you seen the front cover of the latest edition of Private Eye?
It has a photo of Obama shaking hands with an obviously very happy Prime Minister Tweedle Brown, and Obama is saying to Broon,
"Congratulations! You won a by-election."
Brilliant!
As for the timing of the by-election at Glenrothes - at least New Labour managed to get that right, as all the bad news starts to come flooding in about how big the bills are going to be that we're all going to have to pay, in order to underwrite New Labour's phoney economic boom of the past 10 years.
Of course, the phoney UK economy goes way back to Thatcher and 1979 and her wasting Scottish oil-wealth to underwrite her phoney economics - in order to transfer public assets and public wealth to her rich chums in the City and abroad, called 'privatisation'.
The British public is up to its ears in debt for decades to come - whilst ths 'spivs' have purloined vast amounts of public assets and wealth via the old Tories and the New Tories.
This is what First Minister Salmond was refering to, before the so-called 'credit crunch' occured,
in an interview with Iain Dale. The First Minister pointed out differences between classical liberal economics of Adam Smith and the phoney neo-liberal economics of Thatcher, Blair and Brown that has been a disaster for everybody but the very rich who are now even richer -
In conversation with... Alex Salmond
Iain Dale
Total Politics blog
Aug 2008
In the light of the 'credit crunch' and New Labour's vast public subsidies to banks and its vast public borrowing to be announced next week, its quite interesting to read the false outrage and synthetic furore of New Labour and that other champion of neo-liberal economics, The Herald newspaper, from August, a few months ago just, regarding Alex Salmond's views on economics -
Labour outraged as Salmond excuses Thatcherite economics
The Herald
22 Aug 2008
And still the British media managed to miss the Scottish First Minister's criticisms of neo-liberalism, made just a month or two before the 1929-South Sea Bubble burst - instead, his quote about Iceland and an arc of prosperity got all the air-time!
Sorry to go on. Once I started I couldn't stop.
all the best BB!
ps
I see IndyGal is back in Europe once more - off on holiday, again.
She's only just back from Donegal!
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