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