Wednesday, July 24, 2019

Risk it for a Biscuit; Scottish Labour Party loses candidate Rhea Wolfson in Labour HQ designated top Scottish target seat of Livingston, given party HQ picked East Renfrewshire in 2017, you would think they would be more careful in their choice



















Dear All

As I have found out in my political adventures if you stand for election, you may not win, elections aren’t about electing the best candidate, it is about who can ringdence the votes. If you are an independent, then you face a hard time than someone with a party machine behind them.

For those in political parties going through bad times, if the party is doing bad, it can really affect your chances of success. At the present moment depending where you look, the Labour Party vote in Scotland is trailing at 15%.

15%  is terrible, people aren’t giving the party a hearing let alone interested in what the candidates have to say. 2015 was an odd election in Scotland which saw the SNP swept the board because people in Scotland who came out to vote were angry. 2107. The snap election of 2017 saw the SNP reduced from 56 to 35 seats at Westminster, with some others having on with less than a hundred votes.

No matter how close you get in an election, a loss is still a loss due to First Past The Post system. You could spend years, day in day out campaigning and on the night of the count, all your hard work could count for nothing. Imagine, working every single week with no guarantee of success, such a thing can crush you especially if you are in a main party.

One person who doesn’t want to put the time in as a candidate for the Scottish Labour Party is Jewish Scottish Labour activist Rhea Wolfson. The seat she was selected for was Livingstone. The constituency has been held since 2015 by the SNP MP Hannah Bardell, not classed by anyone of note as an Einstein. Her claim to fame is wearing a Scotland football shirt in the House of Commons.

Yes, that is what Rhea Wolfson had as opposition.

With job security in doubt, I suppose that it isn’t surprising that Wolfson stepped down as the candidate for Livingston to concentrate on her job as a GMB Scotland organiser. At least in her job she gets a return, probably paid monthly and if she keeps her nose clean a return when Scottish Labour’s fortunes improve.

In 2017, the Jeremy Corbyn supporter increased Labour’s vote in the seat, as the SNP’s majority fell from around 17,000 to 4000. Given the 2015 election was odd; the fall in the vote in any seat cannot be attributed to the candidate or the party. Of course that doesn’t mean she didn’t work hard, just that the national picture and other factors had played themselves out. You see trying to sustain voter anger because it is based on emotion and not logic.

In stepping down she wrote:

“Today I stepped down as PPC for Livingston to focus on the work I do with the amazing GMB Scotland. I'm grateful for everyone's support and can't wait to support any future candidate taking on Boris Johnson's Government”.
That means there is a vacancy in sunny Livingston. This is an interesting seat previously held by Robin Cook and Jim Devine for Labour. While Cook was well regarded, Jim Devine was involved in the Westminster expenses scandal and got slammed up in the pokey.


Sentenced to 16 months

Wolfson’s exit leaves Scottish Labour with a vacancy in the target seat as speculation grows that Boris Johnson may be forced to hold an early election because of the continued Commons impasse over Brexit. We have a unique situation in that both the Labour Party and the Conservative Party don’t want a general election because the outcome is so unsure for either.  If anything an early election suits the minor parties, such as the Lib Dems, the SNP and Brexit Party.

In a letter to Scottish General Secretary Brian Roy, Ms Wolfson said her union job required “huge dedication in terms of time and energy”.

Presumably she knew this before standing as a candidate?

She said:

“Given the value I place on my GMB work and the competing demands of running for parliament... I feel I must make the choice to stand down as the Labour candidate.”

In her tweet, she added:

“I can’t wait to support any future candidate taking on Boris Johnson’s Government.”

The value being; paying her bills and having a career chugging along nice!

If you are standing for Westminster or Holyrood, then effectively you have to do so as a full time gig, especially when your party is down in the polls. Yup, you have to stick in double digit hours. If you don’t treat it as a full time job, you lower your chances of success seriously.

Rhea Wolfson could be under the impression that the input by her will not deliver desired result. 4,000 votes is still a hill to climb because the 2017 evened out the political landscape for the foreseeable future. Whether it is an early election or 2022 for Westminster, I doubt chances of success are much above 70/30.

Yours sincerely

George Laird
The Campaign for Human Rights at Glasgow University

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Lie@bour are not worth mentioning, they really are finished.