Letters / Discourteous and misleading
Your piece about the Shetland Green Party announcing their candidate was I would suggest somewhat discourteous to the candidate.
Armitage announced as Green candidate for Scottish elections
The candidate is councillor Dr Alex Armitage, his correct title, not Armitage! He has hard earned both titles and deserves respect. He is of course too modest and polite to point this out to you. I, however, as you know, am not.
The complete absence of any overview or analysis of the Green vote in Shetland over the past six years, only quoting the Westminster results, was, in the Holyrood context, very misleading.
The Holyrood elections are very different to the Westminster elections. Quoting the latter result has no relationship to the former election results unless you dis-aggregate votes between Orkney and Shetland. Look at the history from 2019 onwards.
Your reporting of councillor Dr Armitage’s percentage of the Orkney and Shetland vote gained at the Westminster General Election is correct, but you fail to give, or do any analysis whatsoever, to show the Shetland Green vote in its true context.
In relation to the Scottish parliamentary elections for Holyrood, i.e. the Shetland constituency in its own right, councillor Dr Armitage achieved 14 per cent of the Shetland vote in the Westminster election of 2024.
The SNP achieved 17.2 per cent but this is Orkney & Shetland and by any stretch of the imagination if we dis-aggregate for Shetland alone is a very significant decline from their peak, five years ago of 42per cent.
The direction of travel of the Shetland Green vote is very clear – significantly upward. Exponential in fact, from 1.6 per cent in 2019 to 14 per cent in 2024.
If that kind of increase continues a vote of 39 per cent could be achieved in May, enough to win the seat in a three way vote.
Finally, we do have two track records that we can compare over the past four years: councillor Dr Armitage and councillor Macdonald.
With one in three people in Shetland shockingly not voting – probable because they did not see anything worth voting for (are they really all the same?) and council election turnouts seeing two out of three people not voting (I wonder why?) the bottom line in the coming election is [that] it is a three-candidate race, with Scottish Labour’s performance since the 00’s putting them completely out of the running.
We live in interesting times, perhaps unfortunately, given the global stage. That said, Holyrood matters. It matters a great deal. Time to be brave. Time for change, vision and proper leadership for Shetland.
James Paton
Lerwick
Note from the editor:
Dear James, please also consider this analysis by our reporter Ryan Nicolson which was published yesterday (Monday):
Armitage sets out election stall with vow to challenge corporations and fascism
