Letters / What is going on?
I read with amusement Douglas Young’s lament (Not worth responding, SN, 06/03/15) about SNP opponents making such inaccurate and/or vitriolic comments that he plans to “tak da dorts wi dem” and not reply to their posts.
This is very odd behaviour for someone who is, reportedly, SNP Shetland’s branch press and publicity officer. One imagines inaccurate statements would be “manna from heaven” for PR officers; it would be so easy to point out the flaws in opponents’ arguments?
And vitriol, too, is welcome, indicating opponents have run out of logical arguments to support their case. Bring it on, I say.
Of course, Mr Young has emphatically denied being “an office bearer of any political party” which, again, seems odd, given his appointment as branch press and publicity officer was reported in both the Shetland News and the Shetland Times, in whose article he was extensively quoted?
It seems to me that, rather than criticising Mr Harmer for inaccuracy, he should be taking up his complaint with the media outlets concerned and/or the person(s) who provided them with the information for the disputed claims made in their articles – presumably, the SNP branch press and publicity officer!
Odder still, Mr Young’s denial of party office has been supported by branch organiser Angela Sutherland and follows a string of other misleading SNP Shetland statements e.g. “Electoral Calculus predicts SNP to win Orkney and Shetland”, another trumped-up item of controversy with no validity, whatsoever.
What on earth is going on? Can it be they don’t care how big fools they make of themselves, as long as they ‘create a buzz’, in line with the old PR maxim “no publicity is bad publicity”?
I suppose it would have the side benefit of distracting voters from serious issues like:
- Viking Energy consent;
- SIC political leader Gary Robinson’s accusation that Shetland receives £19million pa less from Holyrood than it needs to fund Shetland’s rural education system, forcing SIC to close schools;
- Renewable energy causing higher electricity prices, leading to increased fuel poverty and hence, via the “heat or eat” dilemma, to greater use of food banks.
It wouldn’t do to have voters thinking about those things, would it?
Discerning voters will, of course, separate the beer from the froth as they form their ‘sentence to include the following’:
“Brewery, SNP, booze-up, organise, couldn’t.”
John Tulloch
Lyndon
Arrochar
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