Tired Legs and the Scottish Election

Winter Gardens
Originally uploaded by Heilster Hieroglyphics

My legs were heavy and my muscles tired from my exertions at Troon on Wednesday night and, as I struggled to do my ‘recovery’ run on Thursday, I knew that I was not up to running the third Atkins 3k race on Friday. I still popped along to provide my support and take a few snaps of the runners.... oh and one of the Winter Gardens too.


Photos



Scottish Election - my tuppence worth
Having made the decision not to run on Friday, meant that I could stay up until the wee sma’ hours watching the election coverage. As far as the Scottish Parliament election is concerned I had decided to cast my Constituency Vote for Stephen Curran of the Labour Party. A decent enough candidate, who had worked hard during the campaign and supports The Morning Star. As far as my Regional Vote is concerned, even if I had known that the Labour Party would do so badly in the constituencies, I still wouldn’t have voted for a Labour Party List topped by Hanzala Malik, who hasn’t got a socialist bone in his extremely excessive body. My options appeared to be between George Galloway and Patrick Harvie of the Scottish Green Party. I received a letter from the ‘left’ indicating why they weren’t supporting Galloway, including his support of the Roman Catholic line on a number of issues. I sent George asking him why I should vote for him rather than the Greens and got no reply. One vote lost! I tweeted Patrick asking him to confirm that he was an atheist, which he did. One vote won!

Atheist Patrick Harvie MSP

As far as the election result is concerned I was surprised as the next person at the scale of the SNP victory. A short review would appear to suggest that the Labour Party support was done slightly, the Greens up ever so slightly, the Tory vote down and the Lib Dem vote collapsed and transferred to SNP. It was clear throughout the campaign that the Lib Dem vote would crash and I don’t know why the parties didn’t target their vote more overtly.

There is a lot of talk that the political landscape in Scotland has fundamentally changed. I think not. The SNP and the Greens, for that matter, hardly mentioned Home Rule during the campaign, despite it being the raison d’etre of the SNP. A point I put to both Alex Salmond and Patrick via the STV Party Leaders Interviews with Bernard Ponsonby. The reality is that Scotland didn’t vote for independence, that will be the subject of a referendum, but the Scottish people maintained their support for left of centre, social democratic policies. Tony Blair moved Labour to the centre ground in order to win votes from middle England. Scottish Labour has failed to respond adequately to that shift and the SNP has filled the void. Whilst Labour’s Class of 99 lost their seats, the policies first espoused by the SNP’s 79 Group has steered the party to the centre left and to victory at the Scottish Elections. The good news for me is that over 87% of votes cast went to social democratic parties.  The bad news is once again there was a very low turn out, especially in Glasgow.

With regards to the AV vote, I always felt that there was little enthusiasm for a change in the electoral process from First Past the Post to a misreable little compromise.  However it was the only show in town, so I voted for change but wasn't at all surprised at the result.