SNP SWEEP TO VICTORY IN HERBERTSHIRE BY-ELECTION

 Cllr. John McNally is the SNP's latest elected representative following his decisive victory in the local authority by-election in Herbertshire in Falkirk Council tonight, gained by a swing from Labour of over 24.4 percent.

The seat won was the Labour Party's second safest seat on Falkirk Council.

Since the General Election the SNP has won 3 out of the 4 council by-elections held in Scotland.

The SNP's Business Convener Bruce Crawford MSP said of the victory: 

"This is a tremendous success not only for our outstanding local candidate John McNally, but for the SNP as a whole. Our success rate in recent local by-elections has been first-class, which is a credit to the work of activists and organisers throughout the country. Winning a supposed Labour safe seat with a swing to the SNP of over 24 percent is a superb achievement.

"The SNP is in the winning habit, and this bodes extremely well for our preparations for the next Scottish elections in 2007 where we aim to beat Labour and form Scotland's next government."

Newly elected Cllr. John McNally said: 

"It's fantastic to be part of the SNP's growing winning team. I'd like to thank the voters of Herbertshire for placing their trust in me in this election, and the SNP activists from all over Scotland who have assisted in my election."

The SNP now has 180 councillors in 23 of the 32 Scottish councils, and 11 of the 32 councillors on Falkirk Council. Falkirk Council is administered by the SNP / Independent Alliance.

The full result:

WE ARE THE FOLK SONG ARMY

“We are the folk song army,
Every one of us cares,
We all hate poverty, war and injustice,
Unlike the rest of you squares…” Tom Lehrer

I spent most of last Thursday in the communities of Herbertshire, helping to get out the SNP vote for the by-election. As you can see from the above article, we won, and in John McNally, we had a superb local candidate whom I’m sure will go on to be a superb local councilor for the area.

John’s integrity and commitment to the area, allied to recent local SNP success had clearly rattled the local Labour party. They fought a grubby, personalized campaign, which showed municipal Labour at its insular and parochial worst. 

Ultimately, their humbling in this by-election was almost every bit as deserved as the SNP victory. However, another story is beginning to emerge through the dust and smoke of the campaign aftermath - the slump in support for the Scottish Socialist Party.

Ever since last year’s palace coup against Tommy Sheridan, there have been signs that the SSP has been losing its way badly. Nevertheless, for Scotland’s self-styled ‘trail-blazing, anti-establishment party’ to poll just 29 votes in a local by-election is a laughable performance.

This isn’t a new trend. The SSP has had a string of bad election results since the 2003 Scottish Parliament contest. They were beaten by UKIP in the 2004 European elections, took under 2% at the last UK General Election and in the seats where they have been able to field candidates, have had an atrocious recent string of results in local by-elections.

The SSP has followed the classic trajectory of most new parties – explosive and seemingly unstoppable initial growth, followed by rapid retrenchment as people begin to find that the party isn’t all they thought it was. Presiding Officer George Reid spoke for many when he said that the SSP needed to decide whether they wanted to be on the parliament benches or on the barricades. However, it seems that Scottish voters might increasingly be of a mind to take that decision out of the SSP’s hands altogether. From my experience of the SSP, I can’t say I’m entirely surprised.

While doing my duty meeting and greeting voters at Denny Primary School on Thursday, I crossed swords with an SSP activist who would have made Private Eye’s Dave Spart look like a floating voter. Obviously, it’s unfair to take one member as being representative of a party. However, I’ve seen and heard enough of the SSP in recent years to know that this guy would feel completely at home in his chosen party.

Barely 2 minutes into the standard chit-chat which fills up the time for activists between voters arriving, Mr. Spart got onto meatier topics. Seeking some common ground, he brought up the anti-G8 protests, hinting conspiratorially that the mini-riot which took place in Stirling was the work of plain clothes police intent on delivering a propaganda victory for their capitalist masters.

I suggested gently that conspiracy theories can be stretched beyond credibility, and that anarchists wreaking havoc in Edinburgh and Stirling sat uncomfortably with the desire to create a fairer world. However, in my friend’s eyes, this only showed my naivety. Surely only a right-winger couldn’t see that the freedom to live in peace was trumped every time by the right of others to free expression?

Next, we were lectured that there were only 2 types of people – managers and workers. Private profit was exploitative but the public sector was always a model of responsibility and effectiveness. In addition, management always hand picked trade union reps, which was why unions didn’t organize in the private sector. Assurances that I had been in a trade union while working in the private sector and that I had never experienced management interference were clearly the exceptions to prove the rule.

His stream of consciousness monologue then moved back to the G8 and the suspension handed out to 4 SSP MSPs for disrupting the proceedings of the Scottish Parliament. ‘A disgrace, by the way’, said my friend. Sadly, he took my response of ‘It’s a scandal, Franco’ to be indicative of solidarity.

The final vignette was when a not particularly well-built gentleman arrived to vote and engaged the SSP reps in some conversation. As the voter moved off, my friend remarked to his colleague loud enough for all to hear that he must be one of their voters, since he didn’t look very well fed. While my mouth was still agape at this, the voter gave me a wink and handed me the pledge card saying he was voting SNP. For the first time that afternoon, the SSP’s ‘ambassador’ had his gas put at a peep.

Whether it’s their stance on being anti-war, anti-capitalist, anti-establishment, probably antihistamine as well, the SSP has always had a very low signal to noise ratio. After all, this was the party that decided it was more important to wave placards in the Scottish Parliament in support of an anti-G8 march than to ensure they were able to vote for compensation for Hepatitis C sufferers later that afternoon. While the SSP were spitting out dummies and stamping their little feet, it was the grown-ups in the shape of local SNP parliamentarians and Perth and Kinross Council who negotiated the deal which eventually allowed the protest to go ahead.

The 2003 intake of SSP MSPs have shown themselves to be a bunch of third-rate ideologues, specializing mainly in turning childishness disguised as high principle into an art form. People are beginning to recognize this, and with that recognition comes increased scrutiny, less voter indulgence and far fewer votes.

They have been running around to look like a crowd for a while now, but have built up little community presence to fall back on as times get tougher. As the Scottish people decide that they don’t like what they see and turn away from the SSP, the party is set to find out the hard way that while political grandstanding may give a short term gain, the cost of this is always far, far greater in the long run.

GLASGOW 2014?

 This week, Glasgow’s bid to host the 2014 Commonwealth Games won the support of the Scottish Executive. If successful, this will be the third time that Scotland has held the games, with Edinburgh having hosted the event before in 1970 and 1986.

It is hoped that the games will leave a lasting legacy for the East End of Glasgow. Looking back, the benefits for Edinburgh of the ‘Friendly’ 1970 games – Meadowbank Stadium and the Commonwealth Pool – were more obvious than the legacy of the 1986 games. On that dismal occasion, the legacy was millions of pounds of debt for the city, thanks to ******-all support coming from Margaret Thatcher’s Tory Government.

Although this would be Glasgow’s first time at hosting the games, I think that the city has been here before in some ways. Winning big awards, hosting big events and starting grand projects has been a Glasgow hallmark over the past 40 years. However, the longer term benefits from these developments have often been harder to discern than the fanfares which heralded them.

The latter part of 20th century was traumatic for Glasgow, with the decline of traditional heavy industries and rise in male unemployment being offset only in part by the expansion of the service sector. Separated from many of its natural suburbs by local government reorganizations, Glasgow became a city which provided employment and recreation for an affluent middle class, which then retreated at night to neighbouring burghs with lower local taxes.

Glasgow suffered from a lot of well-intentioned but ultimately misguided development and the ‘we know best’ municipal mindset. The most obvious example was the huge urban motorway scheme, undertaken at a time when the city had one of the lowest rates of car ownership in Western Europe. Also, when the new towns were built, it was the city’s skilled working class with get up and go which by and large were the ones who got up and went. Partly in consequence, the city’s population fell from around 1m in 1960 to just 650,000 by the end of the century.

With a history of government intervention to try and stave off decline, the desire to find the one big project which will turn everything around is understandable. One such project, the 1988 Garden Festival, was interpreted widely as a sign of Glasgow’s renaissance. It also coincided with a period in which several top European fashion labels opened shops in the city, which many took as a sign that Glasgow had ‘arrived’ in the premier league of world cities.

There were clear signs of affluence in those sipping their lattes in Princes Square or draining glasses of Chardonnay in Ashton Lane. The influx of exotic foreign footballers to Rangers and Celtic on huge salaries, allied to the echo-chamber of most of Scotland’s media being based in the city, contributed in the 1980’s to a sense of Glasgow being a cosmopolitan city on the move. A big part of the attraction was that the city retained just enough of a romanticised ‘edge’ from its seamier side to let middle class trendies squirm with a perverse delight yet still feel safe walking home at night.

After the circus had moved on, though, the garden festival site lay derelict for over a decade until it was developed by the Science Centre and BBC Scotland. Running up credit card bills on Versace and Armani arguably didn’t spread much wealth around the city, either. And in the case of the huge turnovers if not profits at Ibrox and Parkhead, these were bankrolled disproportionately by those who could least afford their season tickets and replica shirts.

As a city which constantly reinvents itself, Glasgow has an undoubted dynamism. But it has maybe developed in the process a certain disregard for her past and a preference for novelty over substance. It has a recent history of winning civic awards and adopting promotional slogans, only for these ploys to be followed by setback or stagnation. The image of a city lurching from award to award with little sense of direction is compelling.

We can all remember Mr. Happy and the ‘Glasgow’s Miles Better’ campaign. Nonetheless, how could anyone forget that Glasgow went from being European City of Culture in 1990 to losing her ‘Mayfest’ arts festival just a few years later? And 6 years on, what did being ‘City of Architecture and Design’ deliver for Glasgow that wouldn’t have resulted anyway?

Chasing after and winning these accolades must be a bit like drinking champagne all night – it feels great at the time, but next day’s hangover is a real humdinger, which doesn’t improve any when you see the final bill. These initiatives might have felt good while they lasted, but the guests soon moved onto the next party, dispensing air kisses and superficial thanks before leaving Glasgow to do her own clearing up afterwards.

All the marketing tricks in the world still haven’t been able to turn round some key indicators for the city. The population remains in decline, while poverty, ill-health and educational underachievement remain endemic in parts of the city amidst a frightening level of knife crime amongst young men. Yet these are indicators which, perversely, some of the city’s advocates almost seem to wear as a badge of pride.

Securing the 2014 Commonwealth Games will undoubtedly give Glasgow a much-needed shot in the arm. Nonetheless, I’m still reminded of the American diplomat who remarked to a Foreign Office official during the Cold War that while Britain had lost an empire, she had yet to find a role.

Aberdeen has the oil industry and the agricultural hinterland which was always the foundation of her prosperity. Dundee is world-renowned for its biotech industry, medical research and new media. Edinburgh has finance, its arts festival and an emergent political centre. The question remains though - where does Glasgow think she is headed and more importantly, does she really know what she wants to be recognized for in the longer term?

Good luck to Glasgow in her bid - I hope the whole of Scotland will get right behind it. However, I can’t help but feel that with the patter and ability to believe their own hype which Glaswegians have made their own, winning the 2014 games might be the easy bit. The hard part will be ensuring that this time, the benefits will continue to last once the closing ceremony has been held and all the PR staff go home from the wine bars.