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.

Presentism and the Berlin Wall

There's no point going into great depth about the historic importance of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Empire and so on and so forth, as that has been done better elsewhere. And while it's easy to rail against the human obsession with dates, anniversaries and so on, to do is ultimately to be a hypocrite, because we all do it*... and it's wrong to do so, because of its importance in keeping the historical memory of important events alive. So I'll pick up on something else - the disappointing tinge of presentism to much of the coverage (in Britain anyway) of the anniversary of the Fall of the Wall. If you'd only watched the BBC coverage of the marking of the event earlier and knew little else about it, you could be forgiven for assuming that the real significance of the Fall of the Wall was that it ultimately allowed Angela Merkel to become the Chancellor of a united Germany. At its most absurd, it almost seemed as though the journalists commenting on proceedings believed that Merkel was a significant figure in East Germany at the time or even some kind of resistence leader (which is nonsense - she, like the overwhelming majority of Ossies, made her own private compromises with the regime in order to pursue her career and to get on with her life). It is almost as though the British media is incapable of understanding the historic importance of anything unless it can be placed in a comfortable and easy-to-understand contemporary framework.

*Though it's certainly legitimate to rail against the tendency to be so mindlessly and utterly obsessed with such things as the media tends to be. Though quite futile.