Ketara wrote:Computron wrote:Blair and Brown were both born in Scotland, Cameron has Scottish ancestors. It's not like people from Scotland don't get represented so quite what the
SNP are trying to achieve is anyone's guess. Personal power would be the usual suspect.
I don't think anyone claims that Scottish people are discriminated against in politics. It's more to do with the fact that all the mainstream political parties take a very english-centric view of things with regards to policies, primarily because most of the population lives in England. This leads to Scottish people, like the rest of the North of England, Wales, etc, feeling that they get left out whilst all the funding, big infrastructure projects, and industrial support all goes to London. And unlike say, Newcastle, due to there being a separate sense of nationalism (namely, being Scottish), there's less of a tendency to accept that this status quo is part and parcel of having a democracy (namely, that the weight of your voice in the halls of power should be proportionate to the number of people making that voice). The
SNP draw that support from that.
What the personal attributes of the
SNP politicians are is almost irrelevant. The grievance is genuine, there are many places in Britain that desperately need investment and some TLC from government. I just wish the
SNP embodied less of a 'Feth anyone south of the border' attitude to things.
To be fair, the
SNP were a fringe party for a
long time in Scotland - even at Holyrood the first two administrations were Labour/LibDem coalitions, and this is the first time the
SNP have ever even had a
chance of taking a large number of Westminster seats. If people up here are supporting that attitude now it's not for no reason and it's not for want of trying the alternative; Scots bought in to the "one nation/pool & share" rhetoric of Labour and the old postwar-consensus Conservatives for a lot longer than most other parts of the
UK, continuing to just vote Labour and hope we don't get shafted too badly after fifty-odd years of following that pattern is starting to get into definition of madness territory.
Maybe if the Lib Dems hadn't turned out to be spineless weasels and closet Tories we'd be seeing Scotland turn a different shade of yellow come May and the
UK becoming a modern, Federal nation, but the way things are is the way things are, and the only party up here with a shot at actual power that are interested in constitutional change and haven't fully bought into austerity are the
SNP, so that's where a lot of folk are going to end up regardless of how they personally feel about the rest of the
UK.
Da Boss wrote:Um. Sorry. The conversation has moved on (probably thankfully) from my interjection. But I wanted to say:
Yodhrin: I don't think there is a great single blog for Irish political news, but I do think that the Irish Times is a newspaper that covers things fairly even handedly. The Irish Independent is a rag posing as a broadsheet, but all the quality journalism comes from the Irish Times, if you can get past their focus on Dublin.
They have an excellent Politics Podcast every wednesday, if you're ever out of things to listen to and want to give it a try.
OT, I am reading this all with interest. Some good posts
ITT.
Good oh thanks, I'll have to check it out - it's really ridiculous how little coverage Irish and
EU current affairs gets in
UK news considering how important we all are to each other economically.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
So yeah, this happened:
Every time I think the Scottish branch of the Labour party have taken their visceral, tribal hatred of the
SNP as far as they can, they prove me wrong. This guy's not the only party member who's been tweeting that image or going about encouraging people to vote Tory in
SNP-held seats, just the poor bugger the media decided to notice and point out, forcing him to step down for breaking Labour's own rules that state no member can actively publicly support or campaign on behalf of any other political party.
I know it shouldn't be noteworthy, I posted the political compass earlier and I've thought of the Labour leadership as Tories in red ties for a few years now, but it's still weird to me to see them advocate voting for a party that is diametrically opposed(ostensibly) to their own philosophy over one that is far closer to their own rhetoric(if not their own actions).
