I was going to call it a night and go to bed when I picked this up from a reader though the Slugger Facebook page (give us a ‘Like’ if you don’t want to miss any of the good stuff here on Slugger).
I think its worth sharing before the weekend properly kicks in and long before we can realistically figure whether it’s likely to go viral…
Fascinating stuff, not least because it tells us more about the nature of politics than a dozen symposiums on the subject. Labour’s former Secretary of State for Scotland, Jim Murphy, has announced he’s suspending his 100 days, 100 streets tour of Scotland for 72 hours (that’s a long weekend to you and me), and he offers this video as the reason why.
Interesting call from Murphy in the sense that it’s what we call in Irish ‘Sos Cogadh’ or a break in the campaign unilaterally declared, rather than a withdrawal from the field, not to mention tipping the dilemma it creates onto the laps of the moderate Yes campaign headquarters.
Some of the insults thrown at him are pretty elemental, not least the shouted remark that he will be seen as a traitor after independence. There’s also a spoken reference to a wrecked table of No campaign material, and it being a consequence of working with an English party.
It’s a negative view of one of the Yes campaign’s key strengths, what Drew Westen sometimes calls “Trickle-up politics”. The problem is that the strength and flexibility of its distributed activism also comes with a general lack of control over whatever content they unilaterally choose to use.
In this case, these passionate believers in an emotionally compelling Scottish Yes may, inadvertently, have given Murphy and the Better Together campaign a rather difficult hostage to fortune, just at a point when the campaign needs to broaden its appeal beyond those hard core believers…
Mick is founding editor of Slugger. He has written papers on the impacts of the Internet on politics and the wider media and is a regular guest and speaking events across Ireland, the UK and Europe. Twitter: @MickFealty
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