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Post by CC on Nov 26, 2019 12:51:46 GMT
If you were hoping to vote for a woman in D&G I'm afraid you can't. The 4 candidates are:
RICHARD ARKLESS (SNP) Born in Stranraer, aged 44. He was our MP from 2015 to 2017, defeating Labour's sitting member but then losing to his Tory opponent.
TED THOMPSON (Labour) Raised in Dumfries, age unknown but older than the other candidates. A lecturer, he is standing on a left wing programme but with the proviso that, in line with Labour policy, he wishes to preserve the Union.
WILLIAM LAURIE (Lib Dem) The youngest candidate, raised in Dalbeattie, he is calling himself McNabb Laurie for the campaign, which is fine. It's his prerogative to decide how he wants to be known, but I'm not convinced that Caledonianising his name is going to make a big difference. He is a farmer and former member of the Territorials. The youngster is the outsider in the race because his Party has no record of success in what has become a 3-way marginal seat over the last decade.
ALISTER JACK (Tory) Sitting member, born in Dumfries. Aged 56. Attended prep school. Multi-millionaire landowner and, at the time of the calling of the Election, Secretary of State for Scotland in spite of having made fewer contributions in the Commons than any other Scottish MP.
The Stranraer Observer's position can be gleaned from the order in which the candidates are listed. The Election takes place on my birthday, so, having already booked a ferry ride to Belfast as my treat, I've had to apply for a postal vote. I shall be using it to support the candidate who believes, as I do, that Scotland is ill-served by a "democracy" in which we get a Westminster-based Tory government in spite of the Conservative Party having only on one occasion been the most popular party in the country, and that nuclear weapons are a huge and dangerous waste of money that should be spent on essential services instead.
I'm sure there are economic arguments both for and against independence, but the bottom line in choosing a government has, surely, to be based on ethics rather than economics. If the Green Party were standing, I'd still vote for the SNP but on a tactical basis, because under the FPP system the Greens can't, at present, win a seat in Scotland. There's always a lot of talk, at these times, of Voting for Change, as if Change, on its own, has to be better than the status quo. This time, however, we have the chance to vote for a Change that will make Scotland a more equitable and humane country in which to live, and the world a better, safer place.
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Post by CC on Nov 27, 2019 19:41:37 GMT
Of the 4 candidates in the D&G constituency, only Messrs Arkless and Jack are in with a realistic chance of winning the seat. It's clear that the Labour Party is as good as dead in Scotland even though the Scottish Party's leader is trying to attract some of the SNP's support by making statements that differ from the position taken by the UK Party on nuclear weapons and Indy Ref 2. It's a brave effort but, ironically, the only likely outcome is to dilute SNP support in some marginal seats to the extent that the Tories could win, and our seat is an example, as are Dumfriesshire, Tweeddale & Clydesdale and Ayr, Carrick & Cumnock. I find it hard to imagine that any Labour supporter would rather see the Tories take a seat than the SNP but in this General Election we have even seen former Labour MPs expressing support for Boris Johnson. It can only be because they must really loathe Jeremy Corbyn, who actually seems like a decent and reasonable person to me regardless of his inability to contain all the different factions within his Party.
Suzanne Moore of the Guardian wrote, following the 4 way interviews on Friday, that she was so impressed by Nicola Sturgeon's performance that she wishes she lived in Scotland. She is, of course, welcome to do so, although she might not find herself invited to as many dinner parties up here as she attends in London. "Performance" on television, of course, depends largely on whether or not someone believes their own arguments. If you are happy with your own position then it should be easy to justify your stance to everyone else; if, on the other hand, you are saying things you know are untrue, or arguing for something that you personally don't believe in, it's bound to be more difficult.
Ms Sturgeon is opposed to nuclear weapons as a matter of principle as well as for the very practical reason that scrapping them would save £Billions which could be more usefully spent. Mr Corbyn is also opposed for the same reasons but has to argue otherwise because Labour's position is pro-nuclear, although he has stated that he would not personally press the button to bring about a holocaust. Jo Swinson and Boris Johnson are happy to say they would blow millions of people to smithereens; amazingly, when the political pundits come to discuss the matter it's Sturgeon and Corbyn who tend to be characterised as the dangerous ones rather than those who would apparently commit mass murder without compunction.
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Post by CC on Nov 30, 2019 9:03:51 GMT
There have been an awful lot of lies told from all directions during the campaign in the wider UK, from dodgy dossiers to fake websites to straightforward face-to-face dishonesty. Among the arguments I've seen from Party loyalists is, and this is a quote, Corbyn is less of a liar than Johnson. Talk about damning someone with faint praise! Are there degrees of dishonesty? It's a bit like saying Denis Nilsen was less of a murderer than the Yorkshire Ripper. Once someone is shown to be dishonest then then arguably they have crossed the line from an honest person to a dishonest one and have forfeited the right to be believed about anything. To compile a list of who lies more than anyone else is futile; they all become as bad as each other. Lies aren't always a bad thing. If my neighbour comes to my house seeking sanctuary from an ex-partner who has threatened to beat her up, and I let her in, should he then knock at the door and ask if she's inside it would be wrong to tell the truth because the outcome would be worse than if I lied. This doesn't apply to politics. If you have true principles and beliefs then all you have to do to justify them is to demonstrate why they are valid by reference to facts; once you've begun to con the public then you don't deserve their trust and you have betrayed your own principles. For the Labour Party this is not just unethical but stupid; the truth is there for all to see in the state of our public services without any need to make it up. There are whopping political lies and there are more subtle ones but none is less immoral than the other. If the result of a General Election depends on whether more people vote for Liars A or Liars B it's not much of a choice.
 There was no way back for Nick Clegg after he went into coalition with David Cameron's Tory Party and voted for an increase in tuition fees. There's only so much dishonesty the voting public will stand for, after all. |
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Post by CC on Dec 2, 2019 17:03:04 GMT
Democracy in action! The Stranraer Observer vote is away to Dumfries after Boris Johnson's attempt to make political capital out of the murder of two young people in London failed to persuade me to change my mind. Postie delivered a leaflet to my house today from Alister Jack setting out the choice very smartly: SNP for an Independence referendum; Tory for no Independence Referendum. Since I do want a referendum, because I don't think it's fair that the Scottish people should be governed by a Party we never vote for in a city hundreds of miles away in a different country, my decision was an obvious one.   |
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Post by CC on Dec 6, 2019 12:03:23 GMT
The Daily Telegraph doesn't hide its proprietors' political allegiance, does it?  This isn't just rubbish, it's almost certainly counter-productive as well because, sad as this may be and possibly unfathomable to people outside London, voters in the very seats that the Tories hope to take from Labour don't care about anti-Semitism. Where do the Telegraph's editor think all those pro-Brexit votes came from in 2016 if not from racists and xenophobes in the English North and Midlands? Trying to portray Labour as a racist party is more likely to increase Labour's vote than to drive voters in Grimsby and Hartlepool into the arms of the Tories. People in these places voted for Brexit because they don't like foreigners, and since a dislike of foreigners is also the major characteristic of anti-Semites then, logically, the more anti-Semitic the party the more votes they are likely to attract. Add to that the thousands who don't believe that Jeremy Corbyn is a racist and who are more determined than ever to support him in the face of the most transparent smear campaign ever launched by media against a British politician, and you have Labour not just returned in Hartlepool but also winning back some of the seats in former mining areas that they lost in 2017. The SNP has been criticised from within for dropping its candidate in Kirkcaldy & Cowdenbeath over what seemed to be mild tweets opposing the foreign policy of Israel rather than expressing hatred of Jewish people merely for being Jewish, but, having seen the avalanche of diarrhoea heaped onto Jeremy Corbyn's head by the right wing papers they really had little choice but to disown him. What the papers have done to Jeremy Corbyn they won't hesitate to do to Nicola Sturgeon at the slightest whiff of an opportunity to do so. |
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Post by CC on Dec 13, 2019 8:12:27 GMT
I gave up on Wednesday, when Laura Kuenssberg announced that she had already seen trends in postal votes even though they were not supposed to be have been opened yet, and a woman of my acquaintance bragged on social media that she had voted twice, once on her own account and once pretending to be her husband. After the most miserable campaign I have ever experienced, characterised by the most egregious lying and cheating, the worst offender of them all is back in number 10.
But there is renewed hope for Scotland, where the Tory Party has no democratic mandate although, to my disappointment but not despair, Alister Jack was returned in Dumfries & Galloway.
Result:
Alister Jack 22,678
Richard Arkless 20,873
Ted Thompson 4,745
McNabb Laurie 3,133
"He who holds Stirling holds Scotland" said Robert the Bruce, and now the SNP hold it as the downright sexy Alyn Smith came from behind to take the country's symbolic seat with a majority of over 9,000. And, astonishingly, Neale Hanvey took Kirkcaldy & Cowdenbeath in spite of being suspended for alleged anti-Semitism and voters being advised by the SNP HQ not to support him. Either the good folk of Kirkcaldy & Cowdenbeath don't believe he is anti-Semitic or they just don't care whether he is or not as long as he is opposed to Brexit, austerity and the Union with Tory Brexit-supporting England & Wales.
A final word: May this be the last time that the people of Scotland vote in a Westminster General Election. There's not so much a border between us now as a virtual Hadrian's Wall. With respect to every successful candidate on our side of that barrier, whoever they represent, the Stranraer Observer hopes that they are all out of their jobs well before the next one comes around.
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Post by CC on Feb 14, 2020 21:52:51 GMT
Because I don't take much interest in English politics it hadn't really occurred to me how many shock results there were in the December General Election. Lots of English places that have, since time immemorial, laughed in the faces of the Conservative Party turned blue as working class people flocked to the polls to vote against their own interests and to elect another Etonian Prime Minister. And all because of chauvinism and xenophobia. The most common reason given for voting Tory in these areas was "for change" as if supporting the Party that has been in power for 9 years already is the obvious way to do things differently. Let's be frank; the reason most traditional Labour voters switched to the Tories was Brexit. If they had wanted real, effective change that they might have benefited from they could have voted for Labour's unusually Socialist-inspired programme, but the only change they care about is the one that sees people from non-Caucasian, non-WASP backgrounds kicked out of the country without so much as a sorry or a goodbye.
This is the full list of English and Welsh seats lost to the Tories. Some of them (Bolsover & Rother Valley, for example) are names I can barely believe I am typing:
Ashfield (Notts)
Barrow & Furness
Bassetlaw (Notts)
Birmingham Northfield
Bishop Auckland (Co. Durham)
Blackpool South
Blyth Valley (Tyneside)
Bolsover (Derbyshire)
Bolton North East (Lancs)
Bridgend (South Wales)
Burnley (Lancs)
Bury North (Lancs)
Bury South
Clwyd South (North Wales)
Colne Valley (Yorkshire)
Crewe & Nantwich (Cheshire)
Darlington (Co. Durham)
Delyn (North Wales)
Derby North
Dewsbury (Yorkshire)
Don Valley (Yorkshire)
Dudley North (West Midlands)
Durham North West
Gedling (Notts)
Great Grimsby (Lincolnshire)
Heywood & Middleton (Lancs)
High Peak (Derbyshire)
Hyndburn (Accrington, Lancs)
Ipswich
Keighley (Yorkshire)
Kensington
Leigh (Lancs)
Lincoln
Newcastle-under-Lyme (Stoke)
Penistone & Stocksbridge (Yorkshire)
Peterborough
Redcar (Teesside)
Rother Valley (Yorkshire)
Scunthorpe (Lincolnshire)
Sedgefield (Co. Durham)
Stockton South (Co. Durham)
Stoke-on-Trent Central
Stoke-on-Trent North
Stroud (Gloucestershire)
Vale of Clwyd (Rhyl & Prestatyn, North Wales)
Wakefield South (Yorkshire)
Warrington South (Merseyside)
West Bromwich East (West Midlands)
West Bromwich West
Wolverhampton North East
Wolverhampton South West
Workington (Cumbria)
Wrexham (North Wales)
Ynys Mon (Anglesey)
The Miners' Strike of 1984/5 is a long way back in time now, but who would have thought that coal mining areas that stayed out to the finish, with all the financial, legal and emotional trauma that resulted, would one day elect a right wing Conservative candidate running on an entirely populist (i.e. bring us your prejudices and we'll make sure we'll make life intolerable for your scapegoats) programme. It's as if the clock has been wound backwards to the days of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, when the sturdy, proud English worker endured a hand-to-mouth existence but had no time for imported rubbish like socialism and everything would be fine if it were not for the Bloody Foreigner.
See how the wonderful cold & muddy, miners' and labourers' flat cap Northern English sport of Rugby League is represented in that list of shame: Barrow, Dewsbury, Keighley, Leigh, Wakefield and Warrington. Would Clive Sullivan, Kevin Sinfield or Gus Risman have voted for the Tories? I should bloody well say not indeed.
EDIT I forgot to add Workington to my list of disgraced Rugby League towns. I apologise to all Jam Eaters. This was unforgivable because one of my school teachers, Cec Thompson, played for Workington Town in the 1950s and was also picked for the Great Britain side. The constituency has never previously returned a Tory in a General Election although one did nip in in 1976 when a by-election was held during a spell when the Labour government at the time was particularly unpopular. Despite Margaret Thatcher's 1979 victory Workington returned to its former self as a safe Labour seat. Dale Campbell-Savours held onto it easily throughout the next 18 years of Conservative Party rule.
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