My postal vote has been sent off for the UK general election which is on Thursday.
What’s going on?
The UK parliament and the government it forms is up for election.
What happened to independence?
In the last week of the referendum on Scottish independence last year the UK government threw everything it could think of. Scare stories were all around about how it would destroy the economy, the English would keep our shared currency, the banks would move out of Scotland and the supermarkets would raise prices. A back bench opposition MP called Gordon Brown gave a Vow about giving more powers to Scotland.
The day after the no vote the prime minister instead of doing as he promised to work with Scotland instead promised to withdraw Scottish MPs voting rights at Westminster on English only matters. Fair enough you might think but the Scottish budget is defined by these English matters so there are no English only laws. The promised new powers for Scotland were consulted on and nothing very interesting or useful was promised in the end.
So there’s a feeling of annoyance at the lack of respect for Scots. With the population suddenly very interested in politics (85% turnout compared to 65% for a UK election) people have noticed. The membership of the nationalist parties has quadrupled and the current UK election has many people wondering what’s in it for Scotland.
What’s in it for Scotland?
There are 3 major London based parties and they are showing none of the optimism shown by the Yes side in the referendum campaign. Almost exclusively they talk down Scotland continuing to say it’s too small and too poor to manage its own affairs. So the opinion polls have shown people prefer an optimistic message as the SNP gives and they have been forecast to go from 6 seats in Scotland to every single of the 59 seats.
With England equally split between the Tory and Labour parties it seems likely the deciding vote for approval of government business will be from the SNP. The English media have gone a bit nuts at this and started querying if this is legitimate and a valid part of the constitutional setup. Which makes Scottish voters wonder what happened to all those promises of wanting to work together during the referendum.
Edinburgh South?
My vote is for an MP from Edinburgh. The current guy is Ian Murray from Labout. He didn’t bother to turn up to a vote on bombing Iraq. He accepts donations from the Arab Emirates and PriceWaterhouseCoopers which are straight bribery for his votes, these governments/companies have no interest in Edinburgh’s people. He calls SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon “Miss Sturgeon” despite her being married for years, an example of everyday sexism.
Reviewing the leaflets and watching the video interviews none of the candidates stand out as great parliamentarians so I’ve voted mostly on party and go with the SNP. The candidate is Neil Hay who’s been criticised for having a Twitter account where it posted to a satirical article, a non-issue as far as I can see. It’ll be interesting to see who chooses to work with them to be a UK government and who continues to claim that Scottish political wishes are irrelevant.
See you on Friday.
And Catalunya?
We had a voluntary poll here and of course the no voters stayed at home so it was 80% yes. The Catalan government now says it resign in September and the election resulting will be a referendum on independence. If more than 50% vote for independence parties they’ll unilaterally declare independence. At which point I expect Spain to send in the troops.
We live in interesting times.
Really, politics again in PlanetKDE? You can blog about what you want, I wish you readers, and especially for political statements, but please, please with sugar on top, stop marking them as KDE related or stop getting them syndicated to PlanetKDE.
Actually, I like reading your KDE posts.
Planets are used as a view into the lives of the developers, blogs on Planet KDE need to be mostly about KDE but other interests will crop up too. In this case the politics are important internationally so I feel would interest a wider audience.
Add your blog link oon PlanetKDE says.
If you are a KDE contributor you can have your blog on Planet KDE. Blog content should be mostly KDE themed, English language and not liable to offend. If you have a general blog you may want to set up a tag and subscribe the feed for that tag only to Planet KDE.
I was reading this article in me RSS reader when a certain statement really hit me.
“He calls SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon “Miss Sturgeon” despite her being married for years, an example of everyday sexism.”
Really? I really have to question how this is sexism rather than maybe just general disrespect at best.
> I really have to question how this is sexism rather than maybe just general disrespect at best.
I can be read one of several different ways, possibly it’s nothing, to me it seems like he’s picking a deliberately more diminutive sounding title in a way that would be impossible to do for men. If you’re a politician you should take care to avoid anything that sounds like it might be sexist and here he failed in my reading.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ms.. IMHO the distinction between “Miss” and “Mrs.” is sexist (it gives the impression that the value of a woman changes when her marital status changes; why is there no such distinction for men?), so I am a big proponent of the unified “Ms”.
Aargh! The link to wikipedio should contain a dot at the end. So, if you click on it, add a dot ‘.’ to the end of the URL in the URL-bar and press “Enter” to get to the correct page.
Funny how the arguments about why Scotland should remain in UK are strangely similar to the arguments about why any country should remain in the EU.
“Too small to manage its own affairs”, “prices will go up”, “it’s irresponsible”, blah blah blah…
Problem with Scotland and Catalunia independence is that you’d still remain in the EU… so it doesn’t really change much.
It’s all a big fuss over nothing, really. It’s bad for the “traditional” states of good old europe, sure, but we’ve been fucking them up for ages anyway, who cares anymore… and it’s nothing good for the people: you’d still be at the mercy of the same political cast…
The UK and the EU are both political unions so it makes sense the arguments for both should be similar. I can’t think of any reason to have both together, that just seems wasteful, so my preference is to keep the larger one that allows working with the most number of neighbouring countries.
> At which point I expect Spain to send in the troops.
Hahahahahaha. That is not going to happen. Seriously.
Cheers from Spain.
Almost exclusively they talk down Scotland continuing to say it’s too small and too poor to manage its own affairs
Do you have a link to this? I have searched and found none