Letters / Politics is not football
In football you choose your team in your early years, and you stick with them through thick or thin, in victory and defeat. They’re your team and you can’t change. If you do, no one will respect you.
Politics is about finding the values you hold dear and that best benefit the community you live in, and then finding the party that best represents those values. But unlike football, parties’ policies change, what they represent changes, communities change, as do the needs of the communities.
Shetland has supported Westminster-based Liberal parties for 177 of the 194 years since the Reform Act of 1832 gave a few rich islanders the vote.
The Liberal Democrats love Shetland for that. Liberals gained votes in Shetland, as well as many rural Scottish constituencies, because they pushed through the Crofting Act, 140 years ago.
And it was a Liberal Government that created the first Old Age Pensions in 1908. These were major achievements by what was at that time a major political party and they earned the lasting gratitude of Shetlanders.
Those days are long gone. The last Liberal majority government in the UK left office in 1915. The Lib Dems are now lucky to reach 12 per cent in national opinion polls. People have not forgotten that from 2010 to 2015 they were in the Tory coalition that allowed one per cent of the UK population to amass over half the wealth of the entire nation.
The Lib Dems’ poor voting strategies have favoured corporate greed over public welfare.
Are these the values Shetland holds dear? Do we really think that, with their recent history of failure and ineffectiveness, in local and national government, the Lib Dems will do anything different if they get in here again?
Their candidate is someone who can’t work out how to keep open a village swimming pool, who says she supports the fishing industry one day, while giving away our fishermen’s sea room to corporate salmon farming the next.
With football all you can do is sack the manager, get new players and hope for the best. But with politics, you just need to choose the person who’ll be on your side. It’s not so difficult really.
Davie Meddes
Sandwick
