Saturday, 19 December 2015

Labour & Tories present a joint guide to losing an election


It's rare to have a weekend when both Labour and the Tories drop electoral bollocks, but by God this weekend was one to remember for such an event.

First up was Diane Abbott, pictured above stuffing her gullet with something or other. The Hockney Hippo appeared to stick the boot in her own party when she airily claimed, “I mean, it is too late now to rebuild the position in Scotland in time for May." 

Now parties may suspect that they are going to be left with their arses hanging out the electoral window, but rule one of politics is that you don't say that publicly before the election. 

If you break that rule then it makes you look like a bunch of incompetent losers, something which David "Fluffy" Mundell should have remembered before he went on the break it himself.


Fluffy is the last surviving Tory MP in Scotland, and his contribution to the weekend's joint train crash was to tell the good people of Scotland that they should vote Tory to avoid the country becoming a one party state run by the SNP.

That's right: he wasn't saying how great his party was, or what it would do for the country, merely that we should cast as sort of sympathy vote for his ramshackle outfit just to stop the government that most of us actually quite like from getting too many seats.

So an own goal apiece for both parties, but then Labour came along, dribbled the ball from the half way line right into their own area and scored a blistering goal into the back of their own net. You don't believe me: meet the Labour candidate for the Glasgow Southside seat in next years Scottish General Election:


No, it's not a bloke, it is actually a bird that answers to the name of Fariha Thomas. This woman is so unknown that she has not yet had an insulting nickname bestowed upon her. She has sat as a Glasgow councillor for all of three years, is from London originally and is a convert to Islam.

Glasgow Southside, in case you were wondering, is Nicola Sturgeon's seat. Now I accept that Labour has little chance of winning it, but did they have to choose a candidate who is so far removed from Glasgow, not to say Scotland's, mainstream?

I try to understand what if going through the minds of the two old parties, I really do. The problem is that they come over as two little bunny rabbits caught in the blazing headlights of the SNP truck that is charging down the road and will soon squash them

4 comments:

  1. Thaddeus Karnfarth20 December 2015 at 15:22

    But Ms Thomas is a positive über-celeb, a Caledonian household name, by comparison with one of the Labour list candidates for Lothian, Otis Manasseh Ortesheh. There seems to be absolutely nothing about him online, apart from five reports of his candidature (name only). It's frankly bizarre that someone can reach the point of running for parliament on behalf of a major party without ever, or so it would seem, coming up on anybody's radar. Strange times.

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  2. His Linkedin profile is sparse, to put it mildly. Retired in 2014, did a degree that may be Royal Navy connected in 1975, and then nothing until 2000 when he went to Edinburgh to do an MSc. He was involved with an outfit called Skillsnet from 2003-2005, and that's about it:
    https://www.linkedin.com/in/otis-manasseh-orteseh-89949221

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  3. Thaddeus Karnfarth20 December 2015 at 22:46

    Ah, so that's it: his surname was misspelt on the Labour list (Ortesheh instead of Orteseh). That explains the apparent dearth of information. I stand corrected, like Father Dougal before me.

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  4. Nope, the info that I gave you came up by copying and pasting the name as you gave it me. Either version of the name gives you the same, and it isn't all that great a CV.

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