PINK ELEPHANTS!

By Panda Paws

There is a well-known PR aphorism. If you tell people not to think about pink elephants, under no circumstances think about pink elephants, then guess what is the one thing they can’t stop thinking about?

No matter how much you try NOT to think about pink elephants and how much effort you expend, pink elephants are all that you can think of.

(I so pinched that from Soppy Sunday – just the cutest little orang ever)

That’s why media trainers get their clients to focus on what issues they want to get across, don’t mention anything they want to avoid talking about and ignore any attempts by interviewers to derail them. Which makes the Ruth Davidson aka Conservative and Unionist Party’s constant banging on about a second independence referendum all the more puzzling. Granted the SNP have just launched their “listening exercise” but the Ruth Davidson party have been banging on about independence for much longer than that.

Maybe they think reinforcing that Britishness is already being covered extremely well by TV and the supermarkets?

Still, it makes you wonder who their comms person is and what they are playing at. Maybe they think they can scunner us by mentioning it so often we are sick of the sound of the phrase “indyref2”.

But solid Nos will never vote Yes, solid Yessers can never hear the phrase often enough and that just leaves the devo-maxers for whom never have so many been promised so much for so long with no sight of it ever happening (to misquote Churchhill who was once the MP for Dundee. I can only assume it was once a very different place. Perhaps Munguin can advise?)*

Gordon Broon has been back saying we need devo-max despite him telling us previously it had already been delivered. We’d ask him to clarify if we cared what he thought. Except we would not be allowed to – his pronouncements are delivered at invitation only events and the only way to get an invite is to be the type of person who’d never ask him why he did nothing about it when he had the power.

Speaking of comms types, Kezia has a new comms director, Alan Roden (the t is silent). He comes straight from the Daily Mail. So if you ever thought BLiS press release were incoherent ramblings, it least now you can amuse yourself looking for Daily Mail influences. Leggy pins, ample assets, washboard abs and bikini ready body being several of the more erudite phrases associated with that newspaper (sic).

It’s been said he’s not as right wing as his former employers but is very anti-SNP and ultra-unionist which suggests Kezia is trying to get the loyalist vote back from the Ruth Davidson party. The problem is that like or loathe her Ruth is better at what she does than Kezia, at least at the moment.

That said Kezia did speak well when attacking the Tories for their part in Brexit and EVEL (watch from about 5.45 in).

That was a very interesting debate as one by one EVERY leader stood up and gave the Tories pelters. And Ruth had no option but to just sit and take it. Now if only they could all, but particularly Labour who have been played like a fiddle by the Tories, realise that the Tories are the real enemy and attacked their policies (In Wales they talk about Tory cuts in the Senedd which may not be unconnected to the fact they have a Labour led administration. But in Scotland it’s SNP cuts obviously!) more often then we might have an opposition that is a damn sight more credible.

Yes, when the SNP does wrong, point that out, heck even suggest how they might get it right. Thing is the SNP might even adopt the suggestion. Which is great. Until the Bain principle means you don’t support your own suggestions and spout SNP bad instead and another couple of voters leave for the SNP or the Tories depending on their inclinations. That’s why you came third in seats if not votes. Still I suppose it is asking too much for Labour to fight the Tories, they have to conserve their energies for fighting each other and their membership.

It won’t be long now until the Labour leadership results are out (probably sooner than we think given the number of folk that have been banned from voting). It appears likely Corbyn will win again. If the membership has any sense the CLPs will then start deselecting the Blairities. Because if a house divided can’t stand, then a party where the MPs don’t represent the members view’s or support their leader is one that will never get elected. And until independence, that means more Tory governments we don’t want. And that is the elephant in the room for soft Nos – pink or otherwise.

*Ed note: Winston Churchill was indeed MP in Dundee from 1908-1922 in a multi-member constituency he shared with a Labour member; Churchill himself found it convenient to be a Liberal at that point.

He was replaced, ironically, by a Temperance supporting MP (Edwin Scrymgeour of the Scottish Prohibition Party) in 1922. I understand that as an MP he was not particularly useful, spending his rare visits to the area visiting relations, the Earl and Countess of Airlie at their nearby castle.

Interestingly he was daft enough to blank the owner of the local press, D C Thomson, when they met in the town one day. Mr Thomson was accustomed to greater respect and returned forthwith to his office to declare that Churchill should not again be referred to by name in any of his newspapers, as indeed he was not until he became prime minister and won the war single handed.