I caught up with Scottish Liberal Democrat Finance Spokesman Jeremy Purvis at the manifesto launch on Tuesday and asked him what a Liberal Democrat Scotland looked like.
Posted as part of Caron Lindsay’s Elections, Referendums and Lib Dem Achievements Guest Editor day
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9 Comments
I am still very annoyed that he (Purvis) said on Newsnight that we are still against a referendum for independence.
I would vote no but I cant believe that the Lib Dems, the party of localism, local decision making, the party whose knickers are in a twist over a Scotland wide police force, is telling the people of Scotland that for 9 years (remember the next parliament is for five years) that they cant have a say in how their country is governed.
I support the Coalition and believe that we have delivered many of our manifesto commitments. I cant believe that we are so close minded in Scotland that we will foresake the contents of this excellent Scottish manifesto to deny the referendum. Lest we forget, we are having a referendum on the day of the election as well. Why are we being so hypocritical?
Caron I have tried to alert you elsewhere that you have a virus on your website.
@cynicalHighlander
On a pc with IE no virus warning comes up for me with Kapersky. On a iMac with Chrome its the same. I cant see a virus.
cH, I’m not getting any warning either. Sounds like your antivirus is throwing up a false positive.
Douglas, you’re right on the independence issue. The fact that the Lib Dems refused to even enter coalition negotiations with the SNP in 2007 because of the referendum issue, therefore ruling themselves out of government for four years, is just laughable. I cannot think of any opinion polls since devolution which have shown majority support for independence so any referendum would have kicked the issue into the long grass for “a generation”, according to Alex Salmond himself. To do the same again is just sheer idiocy. And I say all this as a supporter of independence.
As for Jeremy Purvis, his shambolic performance on Newsnicht a couple of days ago showed his lack of foresight. He repeatedly refused to answer the question of whether the plans for Scottish Water were cleared with the UK Treasury to ensure that any profits remained in Scotland and are not simply clawed back by the Treasury. Surely a wee chat with Danny Alexander could have sorted this all out beforehand and saved him any trouble?
Hi Guys tris was getting the same warning.
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?211102-Blenderart.org-virus
Hi Guys this site doesn’t like me posting a link the warning is
Blackhat SEO (type 1703)
Possibly harmless but Firefox and AVG brings it up
Thats not a virus. I think that is AVG spotting some code in Carons site that it is unsure of and thinks that it might be a Blackhat Search Engine Optimisation technique. Carons site is hosted by Blogger (Google) and Google would be very unlikely to allow a virus onto its system. However, Caron does have a large number of links, images and even ranking tools on her blog and I suspect that it is the code for one of them that is making AVG unhappy.
@John Mc
I totally agree. I am really dissapointed in our stance on the referendum and also the lack of discussions with the Treasury over the plans. I think the manifesto is excellent and offers Scotland something different from the other parties but Purvis’ performance on Newsnight was an excellent example of how not to launch a manifesto.
Douglas, I think you’ve read more into Jeremy’s comments the other night than was meant to be there. He said that we were against independence, which we are and he said he wouldn’t want to see a referendum on it because it was too much of a distraction, but I sensed a slight change in the nuance of the language from 4 years ago. I’m pretty relaxed about the idea of a referendum as you know, and we are both well out of step with the leadership on that one. While I expect them to play hardball on the point, I doubt it’ll be the immediate gamechanger it was in 07.