Via Professor John Robertson’s blog, I caught up with professional troll Mark Smith’s latest column in the Herald. If you doubt my characterisation of him as a professional troll, bear in mind that his last-but-one column was titled “What can reasonable people do about the SNP?”, which I believe is technically known as a QTWTAIVFTOTCBBVAOTL (Question To Which The Answer Is “Vote For Them On The Constituency Ballot But Vote Alba On The List”).
His new piece invokes one of my own favourite subjects, the Eurovision Song Contest, and innocently inquires what Scotland can learn from it. The punchline comes at the end, when he mentions that the Eurovision voting system does not automatically give the majority what they want, but instead gives weight to expert opinion, because experts sometimes know best. “Interesting” says Mark. So this appears to be a call for democracy in Scotland to be semi-dismantled and replaced with an electoral college system in which only 50% of the vote goes to the public, and the other 50% goes to unionist “experts”. And that is, to be fair, pretty much the only “voting system” I can think of that might have any chance at all of electing Douglas Ross as First Minister.
But well disguised, Mark, I’m sure no-one even noticed how barking mad your worldview must be.
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While I’m on the subject of Eurovision, this is the final call for any genuine Eurovision fan who has heard this year’s songs and fancies giving opinions on them in a special edition of the Scot Goes Popcast, ideally to be recorded at some point tomorrow. If no-one volunteers, you’ll be getting a monologue, I give you fair warning of this. My contact details can be found in the sidebar on the desktop version of the site, or on my Twitter profile.
