You know, if I wasn't utterly ideologically opposed to everything that they say and stand for, I'd be quite impressed by the SNP. Those fuckers run a bloody effective election campaign. Of course we knew right from the start that they were going to play the Salmond card, go with the public face, "the man you know" over everything else, but I never suspected it would be this successful. Maybe it was because they knew that Iain Gray was going to happen, or maybe that was just an oversight on the part of the Labour Party...it's got to the point where I suspect that most of the Labour Party is praying that they win every seat except for his one. Then they'd get to be in power without his bumbling arse being in charge!
Walking around Dundee East, as I often do as part of my job, you see nothing but Labour posters. There are loads of them. The SNP, by contrast, have almost no visible advertising - apart from the movable billboards carried on the side of most of the buses. And yet, the Nationalists have a comfortable lead in the polls in this constituency, and if the latest out of Ipsos Mori is to be believed, the country as a whole.
Could it just be the Iain Gray effect? Or the Subway Effect, as we'll come to call it in future, the Scottish equivalent of William Hague on a log flume, or David Miliband waving a banana. It's an image that they can throw up in his face at every turn - as indeed the Scottish Sun appear determined to, being as they've taken the Murdoch angle of opposing Labour in every way possible. The paper's editors claim that it's because they get to make individual editorial decisions and think Salmond is best for Scotland - bollocks. They're dancing to the News Corp tune just like their English counterparts, the only variation being that the Conservatives don't have the faintest glimmer of a hope up here so they've had to back a slightly stronger-looking horse.
That's not to say Annabel Goldie isn't a horse; she is absolutely a horse. I don't think she's ever been photographed with her eyes open and her mouth closed. She always gets those two the wrong way round, trapped in the middle of some great roar of laughter in every photo, making one rather wonder if her staff photographers carry a canister of nitrous oxide around at all times and loosen the valves whenever they need her to look jovial and electable. I'd be willing to bet that when away from the cameras, she's as dour and miserable as her policies suggest. Chanting the Tory mantra of "everything's fucked, deal with it" must grind one down eventually, even when you do get to the stirring chorus of "but it was Labour what fucked it".
Being as I'm just rambling now and wandering around the parties, I still haven't heard a single thing from Tavish Scott. I guess he doesn't rate Dundee as a priority, even though we're a literal if muscular stones-throw from whats meant to be his heartlands, which are apparently besieged by the SNP. I actually spent several weeks thinking Nicol Stephen was still the Lib Dem leader, so insignificant has Tavish proved, despite his magnificently Scottish name. And we're actually getting closer to the heart of the original issue here; the Iain Gray effect hasn't helped Labour, but I suspect that the Nick Clegg effect has had a much greater impact. Voters are abandoning the Liberal Democrats wholesale, and they have to go somewhere - obviously the Tories are a no-go, so they're left with a straight shot between Labour and the SNP. You'd think the Libs would be more accustomed to seeking alliance with Labour than the Nats, but frankly of late it's been pretty hard to predict who they'll leap into bed with in the interests of survival and the pursuit of power. The Iain Gray effect has got to be having an effect on those coalition refugee voters too - where do you go, to the First Minister, who is on the front of every paper and bulletin promising everyone the entire world, with a complimentary hand-job which they won't ever receive either, or the guy who darts into a sandwich shop when under the slightest bit of pressure? Apparently when Ed Miliband visited Dundee the other week, none of the press were even told that Gray was going to be in attendance. He just tagged along, trailing in the wake of Ed, who is literally two feet taller than him. Everyone gushed over big Ed, notebooks and dictaphones bristling, then glanced nervously at Gray before darting for the exits, heads held low.
Christ, it must really suck to be Iain Gray.
