Leith Walk by-election looms

Just about the strangest by-election that I can remember is due to take place this coming Thursday. Labour has a seemingly decent candidate in Marion Donaldson who works at a food bank, and is the only party that has managed to canvass the ward, albeit only once about a month ago. Given that there are two vacancies to fill in this four member ward, you would think that the nine parties and one independent would put a bit more effort in, but only Labour and the SNP have even bothered sending leaflets out. The rest just seem to have assumed that we will vote for them for the fun of it, or something.

The end result of all this indolence is that not a single house even has a window poster stuck up, the election is hardly mentioned in the pubs and shops and turnout will probably be embarrassingly low.

 

Setting up street stalls, just as they do for a student union election, only creates the impression that the parties expect us to go to them as if we are the supplicants seeking their favours, instead of the other way around. I can understand the Tories and Liberal-Democrats keeping their heads down, and the Greens are nothing more than a student pose, anyway, so they can be ignored by the adults. The Trots want to sell their tedious papers and recruit members into their wanky little sects and don't ask me what the Libertarians plan for Leith as I have no idea, but the buggers seem to think that running a candidate via a website is enough.

Give credit to the Labour Party as enough of them seem to know that people actually like it when the party activists knock on their doors and ask them to vote for their candidate. When I canvassed for Labour back in the 1980s, one of the reasons why we were able to turn Oldham into a one party council was all that hard work on the doorstep. People told our teams time and time again that ours was the only outfit that came out to actively seek their votes. They were able to raise issues there and then, and if happy with the answers, they would often take a poster to stick in their window.

Labour's membership is in freefall, so we are told, but if they can still manage to get one canvass in then it is possible that they are not as near to death's door as people think. The SNP are still riding high in the polls and now have over 100,000 members across the country. If that is the case, why are SNP canvassing teams not out every night encouraging people to vote for their party? 

 

That aside, The SNP have probably done enough to ensure that they grab one of the two seats, and if there is any justice in the world then Labour will take the other.  As for the rest, I hope that people treat them with the same indifference that they have demonstrated to us, the electorate, during this campaign.

The myth of the Falklands Factor

The myth that the Tories won the 1983 election because people were feeling a patriotic glow at Britain's victory over Argentina the year before has now entered the popular lexicon, but it is a myth, and one that we should at least try to counter. Enough studies have been produced since the war to show up the theory of the Falklands Factor as the fantasy that it is, but still it persists. What follows is my personal memories of the time, because the war came slap bang in the middle of the 1982 local election campaign, so if there was such as factor at work then I suspect that I would have seen it on the doorstep, but I didn't.

Along with millions of others I had been made redundant the year before, so I had plenty of free time to go around sticking leaflets through doors on behalf of the Labour Party. In those days the party's membership was growing by leaps and bounds, especially in Northern England where I am from, and every night a crew of anything up to a dozen people would go out banging on doors in every ward. We did three full canvasses in my old ward of Failsworth West that year, and across the whole of the borough of Oldham, the mill town that Failsworth had been dumped in much to the residents' irritation as we always saw ourselves as belonging to Manchester, similar canvassing was taking place.

We went out not to talk people into voting Labour, but to agree to actually get off their arses and vote on the day. If they voted, then they voted Labour, of course, but trying to get them to give a cast iron, sworn on a bible type promise was like getting blood out of a stone. One way to do that was for every canvasser to have a stack of window posters in his hot little hand, and the trick was to talk the people into agreeing to take a poster and put it up.  We figured that if they made that commitment, then they might just remember to go and walk a couple of hundred yards to the polling station. I don't know if it really helped turnout at all, but it was marvellous to see so many houses all defiantly displaying their Labour posters. 

Looking back at 1982 I can remember only one conversation that was in any way connected to the war that was still raging. It was with a very old woman who had been born in Hartlepool and who remembered the German navy's shelling of the town during the Great War. She was concerned that the pride of Argentina might do the same to Failsworth...

"Hang on, we're about 40 miles inland, and I don't think that shells travel that far," I told her.

"Well, what about the Manchester Ship Canal?"

"Eh?"

"That's what bloody horses eat. I talking serious now. What's to stop them coming up the canal and bombing us?"

I tried to imagine that happening and decided that it was unlikely to occur, but I did promise to mention it to the candidate who might just take it up with the MP. If it seemed like a genuine threat, we would be in touch, she could be assured of that.

So much for any Falklands Factor during the war itself, because if the war had been on the top of everyone's agenda I rather suspect that more than one person would have mentioned it.

The 1983 General Election saw Labour fighting internally, against a backdrop of the scabs, defectors and parasites who made up the SDP. So cack-handed was Labour's campaign that I had to drive Michael Meacher, our candidate who is still the local MP, around the Oldham West constituency in my clapped out Nissan, with its bald tire, dodgy brakes and dubious MOT.

The miracle is that we won anything at all, but the seats that Labour held were the ones where people know that the Tories are the scum that their employers vote for. Always assuming that they still had an employer as more and more factories and mills were closing almost every day.

We couldn't tell people that Labour had the solution to everything, but we could remind them of what they had lost in the previous four years and how important it was to wipe the smile of the faces of the bosses and their arselickers.

Nobody even mentioned the Falklands. They just voted to try and wipe those smiles of those faces.

The Falklands War had nothing to do with any of it.

Smart phones and stupid people

These three are not all that much older than me, but if ever I get to this stage then I hope and pray that some kind soul will leave me with a bottle of brandy and a revolver.

The visit of the A.R.C. Gloria to Scotland

The flagship of the Colombian navy, the A.R.C. Gloria has paid a visit to Edinburgh and I chanced upon her today as I was shopping nearby. Built in Spain in 1966, she was commissioned two years later. Today she has a crew of about 150 men, many of them officer cadets from the naval academy. 

Sadly I only had a small camera in my pocket so the video quality is not all that great.

Waste of Time, Venue 53, Surgeons' Hall, 5.45pm

There are some rotten jobs in the world and this girl certainly has one of them. That said, as publicity gimmicks go this one guaranteed to catch my eye, and I suspect that the cast and crew of Waste of Time would appreciate your attendance at Venue 53, Surgeons' Hall, until Friday. The show is on at 5.45pm, and tickets are a very reasonable £7.00.

UKIP! The Musical, Venue 53, Surgeons' Hall, Nicolson Street, 3.10pm

UKIP! The Musical is winning praise at this year's Edinburgh Fringe and it has to be admitted that the songs are catchy in a foot tapping, sing along type of way. The strong cast carry the tunes well and the seventy minute show is guaranteed to encourage anyone who is contemptuous of UKIP, anyway, to feel even more superior to the Kippers after the show is over than they did before.

Had the show been presented last year it would have been much more topical, but since we seem to have left peak-kipper behind, UKIP! The Musical seems to be pushing very much at an open door.

The historical nature of the production becomes clear when we realise that the villain of the piece is not Nigel Farrage, who is presented here as an amiable buffoon, but his former flatmate, Godfrey Bloom, who is caricatured as almost a Martin Borman figure who pulls all the strings. The fact that Bloom was slung out of UKIP by Farage is not mentioned, probably because the piece was written before the recent bloodbath. To be really effective, a satire has to be topical, and this one just isn't.

Still, for all that the audience loved it. The all white, RADA trained cast, had the almost all white, middle class audience in what is probably pretty much the whitest and most middle class city in Europe come August time, feeling that a blow for diversity had been struck.

UKIP! The Musical plays at 3.10pm until the 29th August at Venue 53, the Surgeons' Hall, Nicolson Street. Tickets are £11.00.

Time at the Bar, Venue 53, Surgeons' Hall, 6.05pm

To work well a farce has to be so finely rehearsed that the lines and bits of business flow like water, and this one is perhaps a little too under-rehearsed, so that lines get fluffed. That said, the cast members of Time at the Bar! make up with enthusiasm what they lack in experience, and the fifty minute production rolled along merrily and took its full house audience along with it for today's opening performance.

The plot involves a pub landlord who aims to give his customers the five Cs of comfort, company and class every night, with cholera and chlamydia added for disco evenings only. You can tell where this one is going already, can't you?

We are then presented with a visit to the pub by the local paper's restaurant reviewer and a cook who fails to show up and has to be replaced by the landlord's idiot son. The daughter and her sex-god, guitar playing boyfriend get roped in as waitress and troubadour, whilst the alcoholic landlady and lovesick pub manager add to the confusion. Needless to say, in the best traditions of British farces it all goes pear-shaped and yes, trousers do fall down.

Kieran Mellish wrote and directed the play, as well as starring as the Gary the landlord. Full marks go to him for all that, along with Theo Jewitt, the guitar strumming boyfriend. 

Time at the Bar plays at 6.05pm until the 29th August at Venue 53, the Surgeons' Hall, Nicolson Street, and tickets are just £6.00.