No, it’s not a five minute chat with an average member of the public. It’s a cursory glance at the blog of your representatives.
Scottish bloggers continue, even after all these weeks, to stare at Councillor Terry Kelly’s blog with astonishment. If anybody wants to know what I mean when I say parts of Scotland are just one massive rotten borough, just take a look at this incredible blog and remember that a plurality of voters actually elected this man.
Luckily, via Clairwil comes news that he is gaining notoriety beyond Scotland — he has been featured on Labour Watch.
Councillor Kelly’s only support in the blogosphere appears to come from his own daughter, Rayleen Kelly. Ms Kelly’s latest post slams BLOGGING BULLIES. Which is quite funny given that a couple of months back she called Martin Kelly and David Farrer “madmen” under the heading “PEOPLE ARE STRANGE” and implied that they actually needed psychological help (yes, the profession that Ms Kelly deleted was “psychologist”).
As Clairwil has found, Councillor Terry Kelly also likes to imply that people are mentally ill — simply for disagreeing with his viewpoint. It is this pious attitude that really pisses people off about Labour.
The Kelly clan’s blogs give off that familiar air, the claim that Labour is the only party worth supporting — or else you must be some kind of horrific freak (such as a right wing nationalist, a label that Councillor Kelly astonishingly managed to indirectly attatch to me). But they never actually manage to explain why, instead resorting to personal attacks and bullying. This is behaviour which appears to mirror certain real life encounters, oh, and this one as well.
Terry Kelly’s favourite trick seems to be to accuse the SNP of being homophobic — a claim which takes a lot of brass neck for a supporter of a party that put Ruth Kelly in charge of equality. And not very sensible when one of the Scottish blogosphere’s biggest voices is an SNP member who happens to be gay. Oh dear.
It really is time people like this were booted out of office. I’m not referring specifically to the Councillors Kelly. I mean Labour as a whole. As Clairwil says in the comments to her post:
I work in a fairly grim part of Glasgow and a Labour stroghold to boot and I am at a total loss as to what they have done to inspire such loyalty. I look around and see everything at best staying the same and still out they troop and vote Labour. Why?
The stick with Labour no matter what mentality has done nothing but create career opportunties for tenth raters. If I had the time I’d put together a tactical voting site to unseat Labour in the May elections. They really are hopeless.
As Will P says, the STV voting system being used in the upcoming local elections will surely help. As things stand, Councillor Terry Kelly is a walking advertisement against Labour (as if the we really needed another one!) and against the First Past the Post electoral system. If he is still a councillor after the third of May I would actually advocate the scrapping of representative democracy; it would clearly be doing us no good. We’ll have to make sure his blog gets as much publicity as possible before the election to prevent this.
Update: Will P launches Terrywatch!
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