Now that there has been some time to allow the result of the Glasgow East by-election, I feel like posting some thoughts that are less drunken and kneejerk than my previous post. Originally this was going to be one post, but I ended up blabbing for almost 3,000 words so I have split this into three separate posts which will appear one-by-one over the coming days.

First of all, I’ve spotted a few people south of the border wondering about the impact of the result on the union. For instance, Jennie at The Yorkeshire Gob, Jonathan Calder at Liberal England.

I might be on my own here, but my impression is that people in Scotland simply are not asking that same question. I must say that, as far as I can see it, the Glasgow East by-election result could hardly mean less for the union. Although the SNP are proud — and rightly so — of their victory last week, the reality is that this was much more of a Labour loss than an SNP win. Deep down, I think the SNP know that too.

I read (or heard, I can’t remember) a good analysis of Labour’s current woes. I have completely forgotten where I saw this, but the analysis was this. While the people of England and Wales have fallen out of love with Gordon Brown, the people of Scotland have fallen out of love of the Labour Party.

As regular readers may remember, I have from time to time been quite exasperated at how much people (perhaps particularly people south of the border) are still prepared to give the Labour Party the benefit of the doubt time and time again. I think now I understand why. The Labour Party in Scotland acts differently to the Labour Party in the rest of the UK. It’s certainly perceived differently.

Here in Scotland, voters smell the stench of corruption in the Labour Party. When you bear this in mind, as Holyrood Watcher points out, it’s not so difficult to understand why Labour lost in Glasgow East.

It is not just financial wrongdoings either — it’s a sense that Labour took its core voters for granted. There is a mega mega backlash against Labour in its core constituencies in Scotland.

Take my part of the world, Fife, as an example. Until recently, Fife was completely red apart from in the slightly more rural north-eastern part where Menzies Campbell enjoys a healthy majority.

That changed in 2006 when the Liberal Democrats took the Dunfermline and West Fife seat in a by-election, overturning a significant Labour majority. That was an election that Labour shouldn’t really have lost. But the loss was just blamed on Iraq, or whatever, and people shrugged their shoulders and carried on.

Then last year in the Scottish Parliamentary elections the SNP pulled off a surprise by winning Fife Central. It wasn’t the safest of Labour seats, but it was still a sign that Fife wasn’t quite the Labour heartland it used to be.

That was in the Scottish Parliamentary election. But if I remember correctly, the SNP are fairly confident that they will win the roughly corresponding Westminster constituency of Glenrothes. I have relatives in Glenrothes and apparently there is a lot of support for the SNP there.

Assuming the Lib Dems cling on to their two other seats in Fife, that would leave Labour with just one seat in Fife — Gordon Brown’s in Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath, where I live. Given the massive unpopularity of Gordon Brown at the moment, any “halo effect” there might have been will probably have vanished, and who is to say that the SNP cannot win here? Come the Westminster election I am planning to vote for the SNP to get rid of Labour.

And here is the thing. The SNP can probably count on much of its support for this reason. It is an anti-Labour thing rather than a pro-SNP thing. That can be seen from the fact that (according to my line of events anyway — your mileage may vary!) the ball was started rolling by the Lib Dems.

For a while I thought that the significant anti-Labour vote would mean that whichever party was in the best position to beat Labour in a particular constituency would grab the votes. Come the Scottish Parliamentary election it didn’t quite work out that way and the only real beneficiaries were the SNP.

I guess in the end the Lib Dems were unable to gain in the same way for a number of reasons. First of all, the media coverage made the election into a Labour vs. SNP battle pretty early on. Also, the Lib Dems did not run a great campaign from what I could see, and I never thought Nicol Stephen was up to much as leader.

Also, the Lib Dems were tainted by association. It was difficult for them to capitalise on the anti-Labour vote when they were having to spend the election campaign defending their record as part of a coalition partnership with Labour. That’s why the SNP capitalised on the Labour backlash and the Lib Dems didn’t.

In case you were wondering, this is an even more quiet place than usual just now because I have exams at the moment. Sorry I’ve not been more active at replying to comments in recent weeks. I found the first exam more stressful than I should have, so I decided to take today off to relax. So it’s a good opportunity to stick a lazy post up here.

I’ve been tagged by a meme twice in recent weeks. One of them will be more exciting for you readers, and I have been meaning to write a post like that for about a year anyway. But I will do this one first because the other one will take a bit of preparation. Because I need to preserve all that brain power for the exams.

This is from Angry Steve. I can’t actually see what the common theme that runs through this is. Still, if you have been tagged in a meme and you don’t take part the punishment is fifty lashes in the blogospheric dungeon. So here goes.

1. The rules of the game get posted on the beginning.
2. Each player answers the rules about himself [or indeed herself].
3. At the end of the post, the player tags five people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know that they’ve been tagged and asking them to read his [or her] blog.

What I was doing ten years ago:

According to my excellent maths skills, I was 12 years old. So I was probably being exceptionally annoying at primary school. I was probably preparing myself mentally for arriving at the big school with all the big bullies.

Five things on my To-Do list today:

Well, I am posting this last thing on Saturday. So here is my to-do list for Sunday.

1. Watch the GP2 race
2. Go for a walk round the park
3. Watch the Spanish Grand Prix
4. Begin revising for my next exam
5. Uh, go to bed

Things I would do if I were a billionaire:

Given that I would be financially secure, I would ditch all of my formal commitments and get round to all of those leisure activities that have been building up. The pile of CDs that I bought way back in October and still haven’t had the time to listen to. The DVDs. The books I bought for my summer reading in 2006 and the books that have been added to that pile since. The issues of The Economist which I unwisely purchased a three year subscription to before realising that I didn’t have the time to read a single bloody issue.

Three of my bad habits:

1. Weighing up the possibilities for so long that the opportunity completely passes by
2. Eating too quickly
3. Fingernail biting

Five places I’ve lived:

1. Glenrothes
2. Kirkcaldy

Uhh… and that’s it.

Five jobs I’ve had:

1. Lifting furniture about for an antiques shop run by a family friend
2. Sales assistant at Woolworths

Uhh… and that’s it.

Five books I’ve recently read:

Hmm difficult one. I don’t often get a chance to read a full book (I think my pace is about two per year). But I have read most of a few books at university so I’ll put the details here.

1. The Economic Development of Modern Scotland, 1950-1980, Richard Saville (ed.) — Skim-read many chapters for my exam on the Scottish Economy. It’s not very “modern” any more though — it was published in 1985 (no modern perspective on oil, little if anything about electronics, poll tax what poll tax?). Good chapters on the Highlands and Islands Development Agency and the Scottish Development Agency though. Shame they never came up in the exam!
2. The Myth of the Rational Voter, Bryan Caplan — Food for thought for proponents of “more democracy”. I thought it would be really useful for my dissertation. It was kind of, but I enjoyed the read more for the bits that weren’t much to do with my dissertation.
3. A Logic of Expressive Choice, Alexander A. Schuessler — A theory on voting behaviour and things like that (cases which should be collective action problems but aren’t). It gets a bit technical towards the end, but the early chapters are fascinating to read. If you want to know why the US President is just like a can of Dr Pepper, this is the book for you!
4. Freakonomics, Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner — Finally something I read in my spare time. Quite fun to read.
5. The Worldly Philosophers, Robert L. Heilbroner — I found this book very boring; it took me over a year to read. It’s okay when it’s talking about people you’ve heard of. But in the chapters about people I’ve never heard of, it was a real struggle to read.

Five people or communities I’m going to tag:

Well first of all, bollocks to leaving a comment as per rule 3 at the top. It’s bad enough tagging someone as it is. I will tag five people here and if they notice it they can carry on the meme if they wish.

1. Colin
2. Jeff
3. Mat
4. Rhys
5. Sarah

I first smelled a rat about Fopp’s financial security last week while I was working in Cumbernauld. The Woolworths there has a Fopp directly opposite, and I noticed one night that it closed earlier than usual. The following day it never raised its shutters — it was “closed for stocktake”.

I thought that was really odd. The store must have only been open for about a week; two weeks maximum. Why would a store need to stocktake when it had only been open for a maximum of two weeks?

It does not take a genius to work out that something might have been amiss, but I never imagined that it would be a company-wide problem. I suspected it was just a problem with the Cumbernauld branch specifically, not the entire chain.

I considered the possibility that Fopp as a whole might be in trouble. But I quickly discarded this, given the fact that earlier in the year they had optimistically bought several of the Music Zone stores which had gone into administration at Christmas. That is not the behaviour of a company that is in trouble.

When I received a couple of texts from Twitter about the health of Fopp, alarm bells began to ring again. The Cumbernauld Fopp store with its shutters down did have wider significance. It seems as though Fopp is in major trouble.

After work I brought the Twitter messages up in a conversation. I learned that the also recently-opened Glenrothes store has also mysteriously had its shutters down recently.

I came home and immediately searched Google News for information on the situation with Fopp. Seemingly, every Fopp store in the country was 50 Fopp stores were closed last Friday for an “extraordinary stocktake” (whatever the hell that is), but the company bullishly reopened its doors the next day.

But yesterday Fopp halted its online ordering service and stopped accepting credit cards at its tills. That sounds like a company in major trouble.

But as if that wasn’t enough, this evening I have read (via DJ Martian) that some workers will not get their scheduled pay packets tomorrow. Moreover, some Fopp stores will not be opening their doors in the morning.

Sitting here today, it is easy to say that Fopp simply over stretched itself. Ever since this year began, with the acquisition of the already faltering Music Zone stores, Fopp had completely changed its position in the high street.

Not so long ago, it was the sort of place that you would only find in a major city — Dundee or Edinburgh were the closest stores to my town. Suddenly, Fopps were opening all over the shop, in places like Glenrothes and Cumbernauld (I do remember being surprised to see a Fopp there when I first saw it).

Somehow, it just didn’t seem right. In a way, suddenly you would be more likely to find a Fopp in any one town than an HMV. That’s how it felt to me. And that was a situation which — while I was glad about it — just didn’t seem to make sense.

For this reason, I had assumed that Fopp must have been in extraordinarily sound financial shape. Seemingly, that is not the case. It looks as though they have just overstretched themselves too far over these past few months.

If Fopp goes into administration, I would be immensely sorry to see it go. When I first visited a Fopp, I wasn’t terribly impressed. But I soon learned to love it.

In fact, Fopp is the most dangerous shop on the High Street. All too often I would enter a Fopp for a cursory browse, or looking for a particular release. I would always emerge with an armful of bargain £5 / £6 / £7 CDs that I hadn’t been looking for.

Just last week, the day before the mysterious stocktake, I went in to the Cumbernauld store to buy the new releases by Simian Mobile Disco and Justice. I came out with the Sneaker Pimps album that I had been putting off buying for many, many years. I also chose the cheapest of the Can CDs, to add to my slowly growing collection of Can CDs. Fopp was that kind of shop. You would surprise yourself with what you ended up buying.

If Fopp goes, what is left? Even though its recent expansion felt odd, Fopp was a trusty friend unlike no other record shop. Smaller indie shops feel dusty and unwelcoming. The likes of HMV are expensive and sometimes lack selection. Fopp is (was?) a perfect in-between situation.

When I visited the BBC News website today to look for news on Fopp, I instead found news about how HMV is struggling. If even HMV is feeling it, it is fair to say that High Street retailers — especially those specialising in entertainment — are in big, big trouble.

Without Fopp, it is fair to say I would probably no longer buy CDs on the High Street. I would be left with online retailers alone. But the obvious next question is: How long will I be buying CDs for, before the world goes MP3-only? What a sad world that would be.

Update: It is confirmed. BBC News: Fopp closes down its 105 stores.

Recently I found myself spending a large part of two weeks working in Cumbernauld. Nothing very exciting; I was there as an extra pair of hands to help out at the newly-opened Woolworths store. (This, incidentally, explains why I have been a bit quiet here for the past couple of weeks.)

Cumbernauld is probably famous for two things (excluding Gregory’s Girl). The first is its slogan. How many towns boast such a well-known slogan? “What’s it called? Cumbernauld.”

Unfortunately, the town is also famous for the fact that it is utterly undeserving of the slogan. It won the Carbuncle Award (awarded to the bleakest town in Scotland) in 2001 and 2005. And a couple of years back producers on the Channel 4 programme Demolition were inundated with requests to demolish the entire town.

The new Woolworths is part of a new shopping centre which has been built in a belated attempt to restore the town’s “carbuncle” image. The locals seem pretty excited to finally have some decent shops again. Once the units fill up, the new Antonine Centre has the potential to work fairly well.

The new shopping centre contains a couple of murals which seem to be an attempt to big up the town. One has “comar-nan-allt” (the Gaelic origin of the town’s name) proudly written in Celtic-style writing. On the opposite wall is a celebration of Cumbernauld’s 50^th anniversary. Yet, sadly, civic pride is not very high in Cumbernauld.

It is not difficult to see why. On my occasional wanders around during my lunch, I felt as though I was in a promising world while I was within the confines of the Antonine Centre. But as soon as I left, I entered a bleak world which hasn’t been touched since the 1960s.

Cumbernauld Shopping Centre, which is joined onto the new Antonine Centre, is the famous “rabbit warren on stilts”. But while it looks mildly offensive on the outside, it is downright depressing on the inside. The place is dimly lit, with dirty and drab décor.

The only real big name shops left there are Argos and Boots — and Boots is due to move to the Antonine Centre in a year anyway (they wanted to move straight away, but apparently messed up the lease!). The rest is just full of independent pound shops and amusement arcades — much the sort of thing you would find in an “indoor market” type environment. Hardly the stuff of a world-beating town centre. You would never guess that Cumbernauld was Scotland’s eighth-largest town.

What little I saw of the rest of the town was pretty much as I had expected. I had visited Cumbernauld before, but I could not remember any details about it. But my time there this time around has confirmed my general suspicion that Cumbernauld is not unlike Glenrothes really. Of course it is nothing special — but you never see Glenrothes being awarded a “Plook on a Plinth”, do you?

Here is the thing that has confused me greatly about Cumbernauld, though. It is a really boring town. Most think it is downright ugly. So why did they spend so much money advertising it on the television?

All Cumbernauld had was an ugly indoor shopping centre that had made a bad name for itself. While the indoor shopping centre might have been a new and exciting idea fifty years ago, today it would be strange if a town didn’t have one.

Did they really think that people would flock to Cumbernauld as a tourist destination, or a place to set up a small business? All it really had to its name was this drab, anonymous shopping centre — the likes of which you would find in just about any town in the country — and a lot of roundabouts.

I am a bit too young to remember any of the famous adverts well enough. I might be wrong about this, but I seem to recollect one that contained a badly-animated monster (presumably supposed to be Nessie) swimming along while a voice-over parroted the catchphrase.

Can anybody confirm this? If it was real, and not just something I imagined, it seems to sum up the level of realism that Cumbernauld’s officials possessed. Why use Nessie to represent a town that is scores of miles away from Loch Ness? And actually, why bother advertising in the first place?

A search on YouTube has proved fruitless. I cannot find any of the famous adverts for Cumbernauld. Instead, what comes up is video after video of people pointing out how bleak their town is. Ironically and self-deprecatingly, the videos feature the “What’s it called?” catchphrase. The optimistic meaning of the catchphrase has disappeared without a trace.

The overriding impression I have of Cumbernauld is that it is a town that was plonked up there in the 1950s and 1960s amid great optimism. But this optimism bred complacency which led to the town remaining pretty much untouched since then.

In short, practically every building there looks like it has been untouched since the 1960s. Given the backlash against modernist and brutalist architecture which has taken place since then, it should not be surprising that the place should be seen as depressing. I thought Cumbernauld Shopping Centre could have been improved a great deal if it was just given a good lick of brightly-coloured paint.

Yet, any attempts there might have been to rejuvenate the town were seemingly half-hearted and invisible. This is how Cumbernauld ended up being a town with a large population, above-average income, below-average unemployment and yet no decent shops.

Above I said that civic pride ran low in Cumbernauld. That is probably not quite true. I think residents of Cumbernauld would love to love their town, but can’t.

They were let down by Cumbernauld’s local officials and politicians, who buried their heads in the sand. Any criticism of the town was batted away (you can see this on the BBC News articles I linked to above). Seemingly, they hoped that if they just claimed often enough that Cumbernauld was a great town then people would start to actually believe it.

Of course, they never did. And by promoting the town so much, they seemingly created a rod for their own back. It generated false expectations that were surely never going to be reached. This is how Cumbernauld can be awarded the Plook on a Plinth while somewhere like Glenrothes can carry on anonymously.

So Cumbernauld’s officials eventually capitulated and the new Antonine Shopping Centre was built. It remains to be seen if it will be a success. Clearly, residents are very excited about having shops like Woolworths, Next and TK Maxx on their doorstep. It was obvious from my time there that Cumbernauld was just screaming out for this to happen.

And even though the shopping centre’s units are still mostly empty, what shops are there are very busy (with the sad exception of Dunnes, who paid off a lot of their staff just a couple of weeks after opening). But obviously this is due to the initial excitement and will eventually die down. So it’s difficult to tell whether or not the Antonine Centre will be a success or a failure.

Some say that it is too little too late. They are probably right, in at least one sense. A new shopping centre is hardly enough to resuscitate such a terminally ill town. The YouTube video that I embedded above was posted less than two months ago, when the Antonine Centre had almost opened.

Cumbernauld might now get some nice shops. But it is fair to say that it will never be the great tourism and business centre that officials and residents alike seemed to believe it would be.

As I’ve said on Twitter, this is becoming a strange election — more about the non-results than the results themselves.

It started off with bad weather thwarting helicopters in the Western Isles and a boat from Arran breaking down. Not to mention a madman with a golf club in Edinburgh, breaking open the ballot boxes and ripping up some ballot papers, which have subsequently been put back together with sellotape.

Now the electronic counting systems themselves are breaking down under the sheer weight of data being processed, including right here in Fife.

Then there were the masses of spoilt ballot papers. In some cases the number of spoilt ballots is in the thousands, and bigger than the majority.

I’m in two minds on this. On the one hand, if you are too stupid to understand how to use two different voting systems, do I really want you to have the vote? It’s not that difficult.

On the other hand, it is a little bit difficult. More than one person has suggested that the local government elections should have been held on a separate day to minimise the confusion, particularly with STV being a new voting system to Scottish voters.

Before going into the polling booth I knew exactly how both voting systems worked. But even I found it a bit overwhelming. Particularly with the size of the ballot papers, it was a bit off-putting trying to find the party I wanted to vote for on that huge regional section.

Questions will be asked about the number of spoiled ballot papers. Four different voting systems are now used in Scotland — a different one for each level of government. It was always bound to be confusing to some voters, and it has proved to be so.

It is way too much, and it has to be changed. At least holding different elections on different days would minimise the confusion. It might lower turnout. But at this rate, the number of vaild votes might increase.