There has been an Alba-bashing troll on this blog over the last few days who has made dozens of attempts to post the claim that Alex Salmond is costing us the pro-indy majority because the Tories are withdrawing candidates in response to the new party. Every time I deleted the claim, he triumphantly insisted that I didn’t like him telling the truth. Er, no. There were two reasons for the deletions, and the first was that the story self-evidently wasn’t true. There was never a cat in hell’s chance of the Tories withdrawing candidates without a reciprocal arrangement with Labour and the Lib Dems, because it would have had too big an effect on their national vote share. The second reason is that even if the story had been true, there’s no conceivable way that Alex Salmond or the Alba party would have been responsible for it. The Conservative party could have theoretically withdrawn candidates with or without Alba standing on the list – it was entirely a decision for the Tories and for no-one else.
The politics of non-withdrawal
I appreciate that feelings are running high as a result of the large number of defections from the SNP to Alba, but the trolling has now got completely out of hand (and there was more nastiness in my inbox this morning). People are welcome to post comments either in support or opposition to Alba, but there does need to be some ground rules. Please note that the following types of comment are likely to be deleted –
* Misrepresentations of my own position or attempts to put words in my mouth.
* Claims that I have failed to answer questions that I have, in fact, answered. (For instance, someone is repeatedly trying to make out that I evaded a question about whether I want a minority government.)
* Bogus claims that my support for Alba makes me a “bigot”, a “transphobe”, a “conservative”, “far right”, etc, etc.
* Potentially defamatory claims about Alba politicians. I am aware of no evidence to support claims that Alex Salmond is a “sex pest” or that Neale Hanvey is an “anti-Semite”, so if you want to say that sort of thing, try your luck elsewhere.
* Attempts to lecture me on what I can and can’t blog about, for example the old favourite “stick to the polling James”.
* Misrepresentations of how the voting system works. (And although I’m not deleting comments simply for using the “1&2” shorthand, I wish to God people would stop doing that, because it could inadvertantly cause spoilt ballots.)
* Any variant on “why was my comment deleted?” or “have the decency to explain why my comment was deleted James”.
* Any other miscellaneous attempt to waste my time.
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I have two more constituency previews in today’s edition of The National – Glasgow Southside and Glasgow Maryhill & Springburn.
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