And another thing…

OKAY, I should acknowledge that T. Blair, G. Brown and P. Mandelson also helped…

But trawling through The Herald’s excellent online archive, I came across a piece I wrote in August 1993 – a year before Tony Blair became leader – entitled “Labour activists and Jo Public” in which I wrote:

While Labour continues to be seen by the electorate exclusively as a party of the poor, the weak, and the dispossessed, much of its membership is unable – or unwilling – to accept that it must be able to relate and appeal to the haves and not just the have-nots if electoral victory is to become a reality.

It was written less than a year after I left the employ of the Labour Party in Scotland (as it was known then). Apart from the surprisingly negative view I had of some of my fellow activists at the time (I was going through a bad patch, politically and personally, I seem to recall) I think my analysis has held up pretty well in the intervening 16 years.

MORE observant visitors to this site will have noticed I’ve been updating the content and design of my blogroll. At the risk of it becoming too long and unwieldy, I’ve today added Scottish Unionist, a blog I’ve found myself popping in on quite a lot recently. Impressively, he’s doing a fine job in exposing the insane rants of the famed “cyber-gnats” with an illuminating post yesterday.

I tried this myself when I started this blog, with a series of posts entitled “The Language of the New Scotland”. I gave up, though, because it was just too depressing to have to go into The Herald site to read the latest weird, racist, homophobic, misogynist, paranoid delusions of people who, I’m convinced, are posting in the wee small hours because they have to wait for their mums to go to bed before they can use the computer.

SNP politicians, whose party these strange individuals support, do nothing to condemn or criticise the cyber-gnats, so it’s up to people like Scottish Unionist to do so. But beware: exposing yourself to any amount of the putrid vitriol spouted by our nationalist friends can badly damage your emotional health.

AMUSING to see the so-called cyber-nats out in force to comment on Robbie Dinwoodie’s news piece based on my article for today’s Herald.

It’s not just that they disagree with the points I’m making: it’s that they are clearly consumed by uncontrollable rage that there is such a thing as a Scot who supports the Union. Probably bullied as a child by someone with an English accent or something. Ho-hum.