• Quick note - the problem with Youtube videos not embedding on the forum appears to have been fixed, thanks to ZiprHead. If you do still see problems let me know.

UK Local Elections

Blue Bubble said:
That is indeed truly shocking :boggled:
Click to expand...
To Unionists the worst thing that could happen is the disintegration of the UK. Black propaganda and distortion of news is the least we may expect from them in their bid to preserve the integrity of the present Kingdom. I await with interest, and some trepidation, what they will resort to if things get even more serious.

What is happening in Scotland is that the Tories are picking up the unionist vote from Labour, even from unionist working class voters; because the consistency and resolve of the Labour Party in any constitutional matter, be it Brexit or the Union of Parliaments, is no longer considered trustworthy.
 
Last edited:
Yeah, that's exactly it. The unionist vote is coalescing into the Conservative party leaving Labour with nowhere to go but down. Some pundits are predicting that Labour will reach single figures in Scotland by the end of this year. The media ignore this and wax lyrical about the "Tory surge", not really saying where it has come from but leaving the impression hanging in the air that the Tories are taking votes from the SNP. This is not happening.

The other plank of support for the misleading spin is to big up the SNP's predicted performance before a council election on the basis of the party's Holyrood or Westminster performance, or standing in opinion polls. If the SNP is on 47% in the "latest polls" then someone will do a prediction of how many council seats that would get. But the SNP will not get that in a council election, because people vote differently in council elections and in fairly large chunks of the north of Scotland and the islands they don't vote for parties at all in local elections. These areas return large numbers of "independent" councillors, a feature that just doesn't happen in parliamentary elections. As a result all parties tend to poll low in council elections.

So, big up the SNP by saying how many seats and councils it might get on 47% of the vote and then headline the party's "failure" to reach this artificial target when the results come in. At the same time splash the amazing Tory "surge" (in votes taken from Labour and the LibDems), and you can leave even moderately intelligent people believing that the Conservatives won the Scottish council elections and the SNP were defeated. Like this.

https://twitter.com/Willie_Hmmm/status/860625198525157378

But to invent a completely fictitious "notional" previous election to compare this one to, in which the SNP won 13 seats more than it actually won in the real life election that actually happened, so that you can list the SNP as having lost seven seats, is a new low even for the BBC.
 
Another good one. There is a place called Ferguslie Park, not in Glasgow as some people imagine but in Paisley. This is a bit of a dump to put it politely. Multiple deprivation and you can imagine the rest. It's like that despite years of returning Labour representatives inthe FPTP system.

The ward now has a Tory councillor. Cue expressions of horrified delight from the media. Even Ferguslie Park is Tory now.

Is it?

Ferguslie Park isn't a ward, it's a relatively small part of a ward which has quite a big middle-class nice detached houses element to it. This ward returns four councillors. The count went like this. First elected was the single Labour candidate. The two SNP candidates split the SNP vote between them so obviously the Labour guy got more on that round, but after that the two SNP candidates were both elected. Then it was down to "last man standing", that is the best loser gets the last seat even if they haven't made the quota. This happened to be the Tory candidate, who got a whole 13% of the vote, that is 657 votes. So much for "Ferguslie Park is now Tory!"

The other daft one is "a Tory won Ravenscraig!" Ravenscraig is the site of the steel works closed by the Tories in 1993 or thereabouts. Well, there isn't a steel works there any more. What is there is a bunch of new-build housing which is not occupied by steel workers. (I haven't checked the figures on that ward but I suspect this was another "last man standing" job where the guy got in on about 15%.)

The spin would make you dizzy.
 
The motive behind all this incredibly dishonest spin about the Scottish council election results seems to be to "prove" that there shouldn't be another indy referendum. Which begs the question - if the Tories are so sure of their electoral prowess in Scotland surely it would make more sense to do the opposite and encourage the Scots to have an indy ref now while they're so massively in love with the Conservative party?
 
The Scottish parliament has already voted to have another independence referendum. The mandate is already there. Despite the campain run by both Labour and Conservative parties, the council elections have no bearing on this at all, no matter what the result.

The Tories stood on "vote for us to stop a second independence referendum" and increased their vote. Labour stood on "vote for us to stop a second independence referendum" and lost badly. Which do you want to go with, guys?
 
Newspapers spin, that's understood. The sad thing is that all the newspapers in Scotland are spinning one way so there's no balance. (You can't really count the National because nobody who isn't already a committed independence supporter buys it. It was launched to capitalise on the market of all the independence supporters who had stopped buying newspapers altogether because every single one was sending their blood pressure through the roof.)

The really big thing here is the spin from the BBC. This has been going on for years and I've been castigated in threads like this previously for complaining about it. It's a "conspiracy theory" apparently, despite a number of independent academic studies noting it, and even former BBC employees confirming it. But this latest ploy with the "notional" extra 13 SNP councillors invented for 2012 to allow the 2017 result to be headlined as a loss of seats for the SNP is a fair bit more blatant than it ever has been in the past.
 
Why did I bother typing all that? Just read this, he says it better than I do.

https://wingsoverscotland.com/what-theyre-trying-to-sell-you/

“Sturgeon’s nationalist juggernaut” had in fact carried on like it had hit a wasp on the motorway at 70mph, improving its position in the council elections by every possible measure – more votes, bigger vote share, more seats, much bigger lead over the second-place party, first place in more councils – while Ruth Davidson stopped to loot Kezia Dugdale’s horrific car-crash behind it.
Click to expand...
 
Last edited:
The Herald reports
MEMBERS of the Orange Order have won council seats in the local elections by standing for the Labour and Tory parties, the Sunday Herald can reveal. The Orange Order has boasted that its elected councillors will work to derail a second independence referendum, the organisation’s Scottish leader said.

Grand Orange Lodge of Scotland Grand Master Jim McHarg said the organisation now wanted to stir the Unionist population against independence.

A “huge number” of Lodge supporters are Tories, McHarg said, as he praised Ruth Davidson for basing her council election campaign on opposition to a second referendum.​
This confirms the main point. To Unionists nothing matters except the union, so they don't care whether their members are elected as Labour or Tory, except of course that the Tories made an issue of the union while Labour thinks local elections aren't "about that", and nobody should raise it in these campaigns. That makes Labour somewhat less attractive to the Orange Order, because although Labour are Unionists, they sometimes think about other things.

It will be recalled that OO members perpetrated a brutal triumphalist riot in George Square following the result of the last Indyref. These people are serious.
http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/...councils_as_Labour_and_Tory_members/?ref=ebln
 
Last edited:
Actually if you look at the Wings article I linked to above, there was a fair old tom of Labour election literature spouting exactly the same "no to a second referendum" mantra that the Tories focussed on.

I agree the OO are thugs. They are likely to be violent. They are actually "the darker side of nationalism" in Scotland.
 
Craig B said:
The Herald reports
MEMBERS of the Orange Order have won council seats in the local elections by standing for the Labour and Tory parties, the Sunday Herald can reveal. The Orange Order has boasted that its elected councillors will work to derail a second independence referendum, the organisation’s Scottish leader said.

Grand Orange Lodge of Scotland Grand Master Jim McHarg said the organisation now wanted to stir the Unionist population against independence.

A “huge number” of Lodge supporters are Tories, McHarg said, as he praised Ruth Davidson for basing her council election campaign on opposition to a second referendum.​
This confirms the main point. To Unionists nothing matters except the union, so they don't care whether their members are elected as Labour or Tory, except of course that the Tories made an issue of the union while Labour thinks local elections aren't "about that", and nobody should raise it in these campaigns. That makes Labour somewhat less attractive to the Orange Order, because although Labour are Unionists, they sometimes think about other things.

It will be recalled that OO members perpetrated a brutal triumphalist riot in George Square following the result of the last Indyref. These people are serious.
http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/...councils_as_Labour_and_Tory_members/?ref=ebln
Click to expand...

The Orange Order. The Rangers FC. the Scottish Conservatives.

An actual axis of evil right there.
 
Rolfe said:
Actually if you look at the Wings article I linked to above, there was a fair old tom of Labour election literature spouting exactly the same "no to a second referendum" mantra that the Tories focussed on.

I agree the OO are thugs. They are likely to be violent. They are actually "the darker side of nationalism" in Scotland.
Click to expand...
As long as that "nationalism" is understood as enthusiasm for the Union, not support for independence for Scotland or other constituent countries of the UK.
 
bluesjnr said:
I'd like to know why you haven't included Glasgow Celtic FC alongside the reprehensible Rangers FC in your list?
Click to expand...
They're not anything like as sectarian, to their credit. That is a general feature of the movements with which they are identified. The Orange Order is highly sectarian in its affiliation practices. Irish republican movements are not, anything like as much, if at all.

That is not because Catholics are more meritorious than Protestants. It is comparable with the anti apartheid movement. The ruling castes, if they are defined in racial or religious terms, have to be concerned about the race or religion of anyone who seeks to affiliate to them. But movements representing the excluded social or ethnic groups have no such requirement. See for example the Proclamation of 1916, extolled by many a Celtic supporter.
The Republic guarantees religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens, and declares its resolve to pursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole nation and of all its parts, cherishing all of the children of the nation equally, and oblivious of the differences carefully fostered by an alien Government, which have divided a minority from the majority in the past.​

BY comparison, here is the PM of NI speaking in the NI parliament in 1934
All I boast of is that we are a Protestant Parliament and a Protestant State.​
 
Last edited:
Craig B said:
As long as that "nationalism" is understood as enthusiasm for the Union, not support for independence for Scotland or other constituent countries of the UK.
Click to expand...


Exactly. It's a peculiar feature of British discourse that only supporters of independence are held to be guilty of "nationalism". The union-flag-draped jackbooted bigotry on the other side somehow isn't.

I mean I've seen tweets aimed at someone making a rational economic case for an independent Scotland which said "you can't eat a flag", from accounts whose profiles are draped in the Butcher's Apron with a few poppies for good measure. And they weren't being ironic.
 
Rolfe said:
Exactly. It's a peculiar feature of British discourse that only supporters of independence are held to be guilty of "nationalism".
Click to expand...

Tbh, I think that's a pretty typical stance taken against pro-independence groups.

Someone who is a Spanish hyper-nationalist is patriotic but someone who is pro Catalan, Basque, Navarra independence would be a dangerous nationalist.

Likewise Canada/Quebec, USA/Confederacy, Russia/Chechnya and so on IMO.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom