Friday 13 November 2009

Oor Wullie

A little detail of interest from the recent Glasgow North East* by-election reproduced from the blog of BBC's Scotland's political editor:

"Big question for [the SNP] is why the seat is so different from Glasgow East, which they won in the summer of 2008.

Party strategists say the big difference is that, in east, they were able to corral aspirational voters and persuade them things could and should be better.

Faced with the hopelessness witnessed in Glasgow North East, that was a much tougher task."

Fascinating. Not because it's true (it isn't much more than a classist slur - the main difference between Glasgow North East and Glasgow East being that the latter includes a surprisingly large swath of lower middle class suburbia, while the former is about as close to being totally proletarian as places get anywhere. There are minor exceptions, but only minor exceptions. Of course, that in itself doesn't explain the massive disparity in the results - all it tells us is that there was never any chance of Glasgow North East being lost) but because of what it says about the SNP's real attitude to the Working Class and to poverty. Much the same can be said of the disgusting tendency to argue that poor people voting Labour is an example of pure studity and nothing else (a line of "thought" demolished (though surely not for the last time) over here). Anyway, the real question is this: why should political parties that accuse people of being stupid and "hopeless" be surprised when these people don't vote for them? And why should these people be criticised for voting for political parties that value them as human beings?


Update: I see that a Scottish Labour activist is appropriately irritated by the SNP's "aspirational" and "hopelessness" comments.

*I miss the old Glasgow constituency names - and Glasgow Springburn was one of the best.

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