Desperate Labour plans snap Fife poll - Scotland on Sunday


I live in this constituency and, unlike in Glasgow East, where a 22% swing was required, the swing needed here is only 14%. Another loss to the SNP will mean the and of Brown as Prime Minister. Not before time.

This isn't directly connected but perhaps it may illustrate a point.

The Northern Territory in Australia is a very big place in terms of land but very small in terms of population. I think they have something like 200,000 people or so. It has been governed (limited self-government as it is a Territory and not a State) by a conservative coalition for years until several years ago when the Australian Labor Party won victory.

The Chief Minister of the NT, Clare Martin recently quit politics (well, several months ago) and cleared out. While she had done a pretty good job things were going off the rails a bit for her so she bugged out which is fair enough.

Her deputy became Chief Minister. His government had something like 2 years before it was required to face the electorate. He went early. The ALP in the NT got a bloody flogging. It was returned with a one seat majority (very small assembly of course, but it had been in government with about four or five seats in majority in an Assembly of 25 seats).

What I'm getting at is in the NT the folks up there smelled what the govt was up to. They interpreted it as opportunism. The government didn't need to go to the people, but they cracked an early election. The electorate got annoyed and smacked the government for pulling one on.

If this Scottish by-election is perceived as a bit of opportunism then I reckon Gordon Brown and Labour in the UK are going to be in more strife than the early settlers.

Yeah, if Labour can't win the seat next-door to his own Brown is finished. As U said I work in his constituency and the laboristas there has been running round like headless chickens since last May.

The biggest problem facing the SNP is that Labour could (in the past) select a tumshie (neep/ turnip/ rutabaga) with a Labour rosette and it would be elected. Interesting times here.

Just guessing here. Do you think the SNP now represents to working class Scots what the Labour Party used to be and still should be?

Is Brown's seat a working class seat or is it middle class? Sorry to use clumsy terms but I've only been to Scotland once and I only know a little bit about its social makeup (and my best mate at school here was a mad Partick fan so all I got from him was about Glasgow).

If the answer is yes, there is a large working class vote, then I think the SNP is going to romp it home there.

Every seat in Scotland is a mixture of all classes (which is a description I don't like as everybody who gets a wage is working class).

The Labour party is no longer a socialist party. It isn't much different from the Tories now. The straws that broke the camels back were, I think, how Blair took us into Bushes hostile take-over of the Iraqi oil industry and Browns fawning over that bitch Thatcher (a woman who is detested by a large majority of the Scottish populace).

Yes, there are people who work for a living and there are those who sit on their fat arses and live off inheritances and stolen land given to their ancestors by grateful despotic rulers (I'm thinking specifically of English as opposed to Scottish history now). The problem is that there are workers who have been conned into believing they aren't workers (the so-called middle class) and who will cast their vote in the mistaken belief that they are anything but workers. The Tories lived off that for years. Disraeli's famous obituary in The Times, the one that referred to his political genius as being able to discern the innate conservative voter in the working class, "as a sculptor sees an angel in marble" comes readily to mind. Sadly both the Alf Garnett type and the aspirant shopkeeper think that it's right and proper to vote Tory.

Anyway, enough of my ranting. Yes, Blair thought he could control Bush. Wrong. But even then his Third Way was Thatcherism Lite. I wasn't aware that Brown sucked up to Maggie T, I thought he was a bit of a leftist in his youth, but there you go, wrong again. Bloody well sold out. Effing Hampstead socialists, they deserve the boot.

The Tories lived off that for years. They did indeed, but the Tories are a spent force in Scotland.

They have a total of ONE MP sitting in Westmonster (NB: Not a typo)for a Scottish constituency. Mind you, that's a 100% improvment over the last election.............