Stephen Bird (Page 7)

One of my big failings in life is that I’m a big fan of American political satire and comedy. I love Saturday Night Live and even more Real Time with Bill Mather. I also confess to admiring the way American political shows use video clips of statements before challenging politicians to justify their views. The “Oh, that’s not what I said” line is destroyed even before it can be reached for, because we just watched you say it! Now justify! At the start of this administration I particularly liked the way Mellissa McCarthy destroyed the hapless Sean Spicer in his role of White House PressRead More →

For all that has been written and said about Jeremy Corbyn bringing a new type of socialism to the ranks of the Labour Party one thing became abundantly clear on his recent tour of Scotland. Jeremy Corbyn is just as much a tory fan as Tony Blair or Gordon Brown. For the Tories to be defeated at the next election, they must lose seats, that’s just a simple fact! So where does the blessed Jezza target? Labour reckon they need to take 18 seats in Scotland to win the next election and each and every one of them is held by the SNP! Now justRead More →

Over the course of a good number of years working as a Training Developer in the Civil Service, one of the early things I learned was the importance of doing a “What have we learned” session at the end of each event. It was a great way of working out what went well, where we needed to make improvements and also as a “Team Builder”. There were few punches pulled, on occasion an ego or two might get slightly bruised and we celebrated the things which worked and as our unofficial motto had it “copy with pride” any good ideas or processes from others. OverRead More →

The 2017 General Election may well go down in history as the “Ironic Election”. A seemingly popular PM decides to go to the Country on a weekend walk in Wales after denying no less than seven times that she would call an election. Summing up just how much the concept of collective responsibility matters now. The same PM campaigns on a mantra of bringing “strong and stable” government and claims that if she is not returned to No 10 there would be a “coalition of chaos”. She is returned to Number 10 (albeit on a very short lease) and creates the worst possible coalition ofRead More →

Whether you call it trust, honesty or integrity it’s the single most important commodity in life and especially in politics. When trust goes out of a relationship there is rarely anything left of value. I was reminded of this simple fact again quite recently when watching that car crash of an interview poor Kez had with Andrew Neil on the back of Sadiq Khan’s speech to the Scotland Branch of Labour. Trying to defend the indefensible is never an edifying sight and Kez was in an impossible position. The more she refused to condemn Sadiq, the more distance she put between herself and the ordinaryRead More →

As we head into 2017 with the half of the media rabbiting on about how much of a triumph we are going to have in May. The other half of the media keep up the recurring theme of the SNP poll figures are about to collapse. There are only two things we can be sure about. One is that the polling industry got it so badly wrong in so many cases in 2016. From the Scottish Elections through the Tory civil war which became Brexit to America failing the collective IQ test. They predicted, pontificated and pronounced to all and sundry; and they got itRead More →

I suspect that the two groups who will suffer most from the shambles of Westminster’s economic “plan” are our Senior Citizens and the organisation on which many of them depend; local Councils. In the Autumn Statement, Phillip Hammond made it perfectly clear that the much vaunted triple lock on pensions was going to be “reviewed”. As an aside, why is it that so many tories are so mealy mouthed? There will be no “review”, the triple lock, like so many other solemn commitments, is dead. The history of the last few months tells us all we need to know about tory consistency. On 31 JulyRead More →

  Although I was not at Annual Conference this year, I did enjoy watching much of it from home and I am delighted in one way to see the back of it.   Away back in the Spring of this year when we thought there was some political certainty, SNP Government, place in Europe etc we were looking forward to building our Local Government campaigns from the Autumn with candidates selected before Conference and campaign strategies in place. Such fond memories.   Then came what Macmillan called “events dear boy, events”.   First an unexpected contest for Deputy Leader and although it turned into aRead More →

It’s perhaps worth bearing in mind that under normal circumstances we would be heading headlong to another General Election at a rate of knots. That many, perhaps most, commentators do not assume so is largely down to the Fixed Term Parliament Act. This was a price the Tories paid to get back into Downing St on the back of the Libdems. But does it really matter? We currently have perhaps the most xenophobic and imperialist Government ever seen in the UK. Theresa May’s collective of zealots will be willing to make people pay any price just to prove that “Brexit means Brexit”. Collapse in sterling?Read More →