RENNIE’S LOONY LIB DEM LIES

Failed Westminster wannabe and Holyrood newbie Willie Rennie has made the most ridiculous assertion that Alex Salmond is an Anglophobe over his spirited defence of the Scottish justice system in light of recent Supreme Court rulings in the Cadder and Fraser cases.


Mr Rennie ex MP for Dunfermline and West Fife (until the voters of Fife got rid of him in 2010) list MSP for Central Scotland and Fife and newly anointed leader of the much reduced Lib Dems accused Alex after he said that UK Supreme Court “second guessing Scotland’s highest criminal court” was “totally unsatisfactory”. Rennie said the comments were more about “Anglophobia than Scottish Nationalism”...."we have the SNP jumping on any bandwagon that will further their causes of independence." Is Rennie such a crass hypocrite that he does not see the obvious point that he is jumping on exactly the same point to further his pro-Westminster, pro Nick Clegg Unionist agenda? Does he not think that with 54% of the vote, and seats, that standing up for Scotland is exactly what the First Minister should be doing?

Those with a mind to sling mud and have any reasoned debate descend into a tit-for-tat slanging match along the Westminster model (like Rennie) might counter with an accusation that Mr Rennie is the worst kind of Quisling that has not the faintest notion of what consensus politics is.


Let’s examine Mr Rennie’s position. Failed MP; told to sling his hook by the voters of Fife in 2010. With nothing better to do he vociferously canvassed the members of the Lib Dems in Fife and Central Scotland to propel his name right to the top of their regional list, without bothering to stand in a constituency, thus reducing the list system to a sort of Scottish House of Lords where rejected politicians, like Rennie, can get another seat on a gravy train without the moral obligation of a constituency endorsement. Because the Lib Dems did so disastrously that their failed leader tucked his tail between his legs and retreated to Shetland, he took his chance and stood unopposed as leader. Now he thinks that by importing the sort of beer garden politics of Westminster and cosying up to Nick Clegg and the coalition he will restore the Lib Dems to their pre-2011 Scottish position. The man really must be a half-wit!


Picture: Rennie off to Westminster with his mentor.

Westminster reject Rennie announces his "team"!

Rejected Westminster MP and Holyrood Jonnie-come-lately Willie Rennie has unveiled his “team”. Fresh from his stunning “victory” on the Fife and Central Scotland list new Scottish Lib Dem leader Rennie has at last revealed his front bench team.

Willie was reluctantly propelled into the lime light as leader of the Lib Dem group after a hard fought leadership race where he was the only candidate. He hit the ground running by promising to reaffirm his cosy relationship with Nick Clegg and Westminster pals much as he remembered it down in his halcyon days in London. Rennie had had nothing much to do after the people of Fife told him to sling his hook in the 2010 English general election. Since then he has had to slum it as an advisor at the Scottish office until a suitable billet could be found.

Orkney constituency MSP Liam McArthur will take on education and energy; North-East list MSP Alison McInnes will be responsible for health and justice; South Scotland list MSP Jim Hume will take rural affairs, environment, housing and transport; failed ex-leader and Shetland constituency MSP Tavish Scott will deal with business and the economy. Leaving Willie as Lib Dem lord high everything else and leader. Needless to say there will be no chief whip!

The line up caused some raised eyebrows as Nick Clegg was expected to fill all the other roles. But in a shock move Nick was relegated to a back seat somewhere in Downing Street.

Arriving with all his colleagues in an off yellow Mini Rennie got straight down to work asked the way to the toilet before promising to hold the SNP and Alex Salmond to account.

Great Fun in Dundee City East!

Dundee City East Labour candidate Mohammed Asif seems to be unable to follow his leader Iain Gray’s call to get Labour’s core vote out to protect Scotland (and in this case Dundee East) from the Tories.

This week has seen him send a letter to every postal voter in the constituency asking them to vote for him. Nothing wrong with that you may think until it is revealed that the letters went to Dundee City East’s current SNP MSP, Minister for Public Health and Sport Shona Robison and SNP City Council leader Ken Guild. Clearly if he can persuade Ken and Shona to ditch their lifelong commitment to the SNP and vote for him, he is a shoo in.

In that case he would surely have no need to engage in a poster blanketing war that has seen a rash of posters go up all over the east of the city, including (allegedly) in flats he owns, without the tenants' permission.

Either way we wish Mr Asif well on his journey to "palriament" [sic: ref Dundee Courier political diary 23/04/11] .

Also in Dundee City East ex-SNP councillor Allan Petrie is standing for the Lib Dems. Mr Petrie we understand has had a dalliance with almost every political party, having also campaigned for Labour MP Iain Luke in 2005. He also at one point wrote a number of letters to the Press purporting to represent his own political party I-Vote.

Of course there is nothing wrong with having political opinions that mature as time goes on but if Mr Petrie’s get any more mature he might find his list of political options getting very short indeed (only the Tories left).

Be that as it may Mr P now wants the people of Dundee City East to vote for him with his current Liberal Democrat hat on. That got me to thinking about his marathon political journey, so I had a look at his Lib Dem biog online. Amusingly it reads:

“I became an SNP councillor in 1999 but resigned my membership due to the constant attacks from the leadership on hard working members of the party and SNP shifting away from being a membership-led organisation.”

Of course what Mr Petrie does not say is that he actually left the SNP when he was de-selected as a councillor. The more unkind among us may say that Mr P left because his political options in the SNP were over.

Nevertheless we wish Mr Petrie well in his current billet and sincerely hope that he never has cause to be the subject of attack from the leadership there, if he, unlike the rest of us, can figure out who is actually in charge at Lib Dems Scotland HQ: Tavish or Nick!


Pictured above: Mr Asif is on the extreme left (signing the table) in front of Labour's MP for Dundee West Jim McGovern and next to Labour's Dundee City West hopeful West End Councillor Richard McCready. Also above is Allan Petrie on a sunny Dundee day!

Labour rub up to Lib Dems in the hope that shine will rub off on them

The Times reports that the odds on a hung Parliament have shortened after the Lib Dem leader’s success in Thursday’s so called Prime Ministerial debate. A Populus poll for The Times reveals that the number of voters regarding Nick as likeable soared from 52 per cent before the debate to 81 per cent afterwards. David Cameron’s rating fell from 53 per cent to 43 per cent. What a shame they don’t give us the numbers for Gordon Brown but of course it is always possible that their poll wont stretch to negative numbers.

A YouGov opinion poll for today’s Sun puts the Lib Dems on 30 per cent, ahead of Labour on 28 per cent but behind the Tories on 33 per cent. Oh dear what has happened to that two horse race now. The Lib Dems popularity seems to be holding up indicating that the Nick Clegg victory is not going to be a one day wonder.

So what will the Labour party machines response to a third horse interloper be? Initially I thought that they would switch to digging for dirty on the Lib Dems in an effort to discredit them. They may still do this. But I guess a lead has been taken from the second in command himself. Old Cyclops that is and not Lord Petronella Voldermort the big smelly cheese at the top.

The Home Secretary postman Pat (Alan Johnson) speaking to The Times hours before the new poll showed how Mr Clegg’s winning performance had reshaped the election race, at least in the short term, by putting the Liberal Democrats ahead of Labour. Pat said that Labour and Mr Clegg’s party had a lot in common and that it was patronising to try to frighten voters about post-election pacts. “We have to kill this argument that coalition government is dangerous,”.

Pat went on to say that Labour and the Lib Dems were natural allies on key issues. He said that they agreed on voting reform and the dangers of Tory plans to cut £6 billion of government spending this year — although he also said that Mr Clegg’s party was “soft on crime, inept on asylum and bloody dangerous on national security”. So there we are the short term strategy is to cosy up to the Liberals and hope some of that glitter rubs off on old Gordo and his crew. Kind of like they tried to do when Barack Obama was elected. Well that didn’t work as we all know Mr Obama finds the Cyclops rather depressing. Join the club Mr Obama!

I suppose in fairness to this two horse race we ought to have a comment from the minority party. So shadow business secretary Kenneth Clarke chipped in by saying that a hung Parliament could trigger “another financial crisis” as credit-rating agencies forced up interest rates on government debt. So the response of the Tories is to wheel out their only remaining ace in the hole now that David has come over as a nice suit and tie and nothing else.