Tag Archives: regional policy

I am clearly not alone in sharing a sense of deflation at the election results UK wide. While in Scotland there was some degree of recovery it was from an appalling position. It is sobering to note we are now the sixth party in Scotland. We should bear in mind too that our gains in the Highlands and islands were aided by the ferry fiasco which the SNP has overseen. Ferries are the lifeline of not simply the islands they serve but integral to the economies of the communities from which they leave. The scale of utterly avoidable devastation to peoples lives and to the economies of rural areas cannot be overstated. That Labour’s sole gain in Scotland came in the Western Isles backs this up.

Bruising as it may be to our ego we – and this holds for all bar the SNP – are not a national party but a series of local redoubts – Fife, the Highlands, Orkney and Shetland, Edinburgh, while remnants of electoral strength remain in the Borders and Grampian. In the UK as a whole not far shy of 50% of the electorate voted for insurrectionary parties. It was disappointing to hear Ed’s branding them, and by extension those who voted for them, as ‘extremists’. It is not a description likely to convert those so described.

The reality of the situation is that people are, to use that good Scottish word, scunnered. Scunnered of politicians, scunnered about a failing system which no longer delivers for them, and most of all perhaps scunnered at being ignored by politicians whose only real listening seems to be to other politicians. We are as guilty of this as others. Instead of talking the same talk and walking the same walk as other parties (however much we might protest that we don’t) let us do something radical and different in how we present ourselves. We are, or should be, after all the party of true democracy and localism.