WAS ''CLYPEGATE'' A WISE STRATEGY?

Warning: This post contains illustrations of strong language and abuse messages, some of which may offend.

The other day Nicola Sturgeon wrote a piece for the Daily Mail. That, for a start, brought a wave of criticism, Why was the First Minister writing for a low level Tory tabloid?

Surely the reasoning behind writing it for that paper was that the Daily Mail publishes story after story about Cybernattery of the worst kind. If your aim is to address that by telling their readers that, although, yes, there are some unfortunate tweets from SNP supporters, the process is two way, then there is little point in writing about it in the Sunday Herald or the National. 

Daily Mail readers who are swallowing the narrative that ONLY NATS are bad, don't read these papers. If you want them to hear your argument then you have to go to them.

Now, if I'd been one of the other party leaders, I would have jumped at the chance to show solidarity with the First Minister on this. After all, you'd really have to live in a Daily Mail bubble not to realise that people from other parties, most specifically Labour, are culpable too.

Amazingly, Ms Dugdale was, until Nicola enlightened her, apparently unaware that one of Labour's leading lights, Ian Smart, regularly, usually later in the evening, tweets about SNP Nazis among other insults. Mr Smart is followed by most of the leading lights in Scottish Labour. And, on at least one occasion, his tweets said that he was speaking on behalf of Labour. 

(It is fair to say that, although it took time, Mr Smart is now under administrative suspension from the Labour Party. But Mr Smart is hardly alone.)

Rather than express solidarity, however, Labour's response was to compile a 50-page document of SNP members who have sworn or used derogatory terms on Twitter. This is what Sir Humphrey would have called a "brave" move.

I note on James' post here that Kezia is capable of a foul mouthed rant, and we are reminded by Scottish Skier, in the comments, that no less a Labour member than Mr Bevan had nothing polite to say about the Tories. I recall too, that Mrs Curran said during the referendum campaign, that if someone ran over Alex Salmond with a bus, she wouldn't be asking the name of the driver.

Of course, the point of this post is that, instead of expressing solidarity as 5 party leaders in Scotland and asking people to be a little more temperate in their postings, at least Labour appears to have drawn up this list, which they want to publish on Sunday (but which has been leaked), of SNP members who have "swore" [sic] or used abusive terms on social media. 

This invites a similar list, if anyone can be bothered, of Labour supporters who have done the same thing, and I suspect that it would be a lot longer than 50 pages. Nopne of that, however, is likely to improve the mood on social media. 

People who swear, will, shock horror, continue to swear. And the very few people of whatever persuasion, who are downright abusive, will continue to be like that. 

It's life guys. We all do it to some extent. It happens in the pub, in the supermarket, at work, in the bus queue, at the races, and anywhere else you can imagine... Why would Twitter be any different? To some extent we all do it as does main stream media. Private Eye has made it a career...

The whole story may be that the whole thing is a wind up... but I wouldn't put it past Labour at the moment that they have actually wasted time doing this. They seem to be totally lost and with no idea of how to find themselves.