We gave you the preview yesterday, now here’s the whole thing. The Scottish Liberal Democrats have finally found some production values in a very well produced Party Political Broadcast:
The transcript is below:
I’m Willie Rennie, I’m leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats.
I was born and brought up in a small village called Strathmiglo in the north of Fife. Beautiful part of the world.
We lived above the family shop with my three sisters and my Mum and Dad.
My mother, she was secretary of the community association. She got involved in meals on wheels and helping out people who were perhaps struggling in the village.
Caring in the community was something that was imbued into our family.
My father was the local grocer. We were part and parcel of the community. We got involved. Hard work was something that I knew was really important to do in your life. If you wanted to get on, you had to graft.
That was the kind of life that I grew up in and it’s certainly affected me now in the way that I view the world.
I think my decision to get into politics grew on me over time.
I was brought up through the miners’ strike, but also the emergence of the SDP/Liberal Alliance.
The ambition to break the mould of British politics really appealed to me.
The people who have inspired me in politics are people like Charles Kennedy and David Steel.
The essence of decent people who’ve got compassion in their heart, but really want to shake up the world and change things for the better.
To me, liberalism means a combination of that economic discipline, hard work so people can get up and get on, but also compassion, that sense of social justice that means that everybody gets a chance to achieve, no matter what their background.
I’ve got two active boys, one’s at college, one’s still at school.
The younger boy, he loves rock climbing, swimming, the Scouts, biking.
The most important topic in British politics today is education.
Everybody deserves a chance, so investing in early years’ education, to help kids who are struggling, I think that’s the way to change the way the country works.
Liberalism, at its heart, is about fairness, is about looking to the long term. Looking beyond our shores, to help other people in other parts of the world and pushing power right back down into communities so it can reflect the wide and varied country that we live in.
That is the essence of liberal democracy.
My message to people in Scotland is this:
If you want to get up and get on. To care for the people next door, across the world or in the future. If you want that combination of economic discipline and social justice. If you’re an aspirational Scot with a social conscience, then back the Liberal Democrats.
2 Comments
Willie comes across as a very likeable guy, but I worry that it is not enough. It is not enough just me commenting here either, but the message of “reward for work plus compassion” is basically what Nick Clegg tried to base his campaign on and it didn’t work (even though I thought it would).
I looked at the Ipsos-MORI concerns index for Scotland, but the sample is too small. The biggest concerns facing Britain according to this survey are immigration, the NHS and the economy.
Even if people have a liberal-left solution to mass immigration, people hardly talk about it. People are concerned about the NHS, but what exactly are people so concerned about? Besides Norman Lamb, there doesn’t seem to be much work going on here.
So I advise the party to get in touch with people’s concerns. You don’t even need to change your beliefs…
The political brain (foreword by Bill Clinton) tells us how voters think when electing representatives.
Referendums are different because the voter decides directly.