The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
Neglect voters at your peril
The fallout from elections is almost always “big politics”. The kind of Westminster – or Holyrood, for that matter – bubble pondering that fails to cut through into ordinary people’s lives.
We’ve seen it in the aftermath of what proved to be a quite incredible vote a fortnight ago.
Never mind the fact we are about to start Brexit negotiations, the biggest of “big politics”, let’s ponder the identity of the new SNP Westminster leader, obsess about how long Theresa May can hold on to office, debate whether or not Boris Johnson actually sent a series of messages backing the PM, and mock those MPs who have “MP” at the end of their WhatsApp profile names.
All of these things are important, of course. A change in Prime Minister can mean a fundamental change in the direction of the country – haven’t we found that out? – and new blood at the top of any party can make a drastic difference to how well those in power are held to account from the opposition benches.
Even for a politics nerd like myself, there’s one thing that’s been nagging away since the general election.
One itch that keeps coming back, one crucial part of being elected to serve that seems to have been forgotten about. That is the group of people supposed to come first for any MP: their constituents.
The vote just gone illustrated a great many things, one of which was that if you are a politician with no ground game, no record of helping anyone, a smug sense of self, you run the risk of struggling when ballots are crossed.
Of course, good and hardworking people lost seats. This is not to say that everyone ejected from parliament was a lazy, arrogant pain in the backside.
Some were, though. Months ago, the SNP’s John Nicolson and Pete Wishart made the headlines on multiple occasions for their activities on Twitter, the social media website.
In an election where both were up against highly regarded “big hitters” from opponents, and where their party dropped 13.1 points compared to the incredible 2015 victory, only one of those two incumbents survived.
Is it any surprise that person was Wishart, who has a track record of listening to constituents and providing aid where he can, attends local events, ran a campaign overseen by Deputy First Minister John Swinney, and largely limited his online activities during the election campaign to showing his work in the community?
Meanwhile, Nicolson continued to live in London and is still spending a lot of his increased spare time bitterly complaining about the electorate being wrong to eject him from office while also cooking up conspiracy theories about electoral pacts between his opponents to ensure his defeat.
It will also come as no surprise to anyone who reads The Courier that Wishart realised the importance of not just this newspaper, but all of those who serve the area with information you just don’t get elsewhere.
As polls closed, he tweeted: “That’s it. It’s been an amazing campaign in P&NP. The canvassing, the local press, the support, the social media, the enthusiasm.”
This is not because any of those papers sell loads more copies than the nationals, nor does it mean any are exclusively brilliant, nor does it mean building up momentum on social media – or using it to get information out there – cannot be a great thing.
What is does mean is that sometimes, just sometimes, it doesn’t matter the high office you hold.
It matters what you do for those people who have elected you on a fiveyear (usually) fixed-term contract. New MPs would do well to remember that.
Sometimes, it doesn’t matter the high office you hold