I DO HOPE HE’S NOT A PROFESSOR OF MATHEMATICS
I cost nothing to run so donate to https://www.broadcastingscotland.scot/donate/
The bilingual blog about all things British
Love, theatre and ideas
British Wildlife & Photography
Why Scotland should be an independent country
Thoughts about Scotland & the world, from a new Scot
Bipartisan dialogue for the politically engaged
Impartial Everytime Always
We Provide The Facts, You Make The Decisions
Exploring Rhymes, Reasons, and Nuances of Our World
Mark Doran's Music Blog
Songwriter / Guitarist
This site supports Scottish Independence
A comic about history and stuff by FT
The embittered mumblings of a serial malcontent.
an irreverent look at UK politics
Exploring the Depths of Curiosity
Nature + Health
http://netbij.com
Movies, politics, comedy and more...
MUNGUIN'S NEW REPUBLIC 
“How we should rule ourselves” By Alistair Gray and Adam Tomkins Canongate 2005
ISBN: 1841957224, 9781841957227
Wanted a Scottish Republic then. Now a True Blue Tory. Wouldn’t trust the fucker further than I could piss on him.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Oh, cheers, Conan. I’d like to read that!
LikeLike
I wonder if he wanders around humming “Rule Britania” as he surveys the uppity colonists. Collecting 2 publicly funded salaries too.
Born to rule.
Even the English part of me dislikes his type.
LikeLiked by 2 people
He looks the type, doesn’t he?
I was wondering if the 15,000+ missing in this equation (uppity ones) were “imaginary friends” you know, like kids sometime have.
LikeLike
Obviously looking to his next career move, journalism, probably in the post truth financial sector.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Why not have three careers at one time. Ruth could get him in with the BBC and he could be paid by the public three times over.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Following in the tradition of Aitken, Hamilton, Archer etc etc…
LikeLiked by 2 people
I do hope he’s not waving his trusty sword about the place.
Most disagreeable.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Oh dearie me.
It doth appear that our ‘trusted’ Tory has been at the alcohol again or using the ‘trusted’ BBC calculator. Oh no hold on a second I hear he heard voices inside his head telling him he had won with 29,000 votes. LOL
I’m sure I read somewhere that there are places for people to go to who keep hearing voices in their head, not sure where they are though.
LikeLiked by 2 people
I seem to remember that George Bush and Tony Blair heard voices telling them to invade Iraq. Now there’s not much point in talking to them any more, what with them being hated has beens, maybe the voices think that his professorialness is the next Tony Blair?
LikeLiked by 1 person
Has anyone told Blair?
Apparently he is spending about £9 MILLION of his own ill gotten gains to set up some sort of politically motivated organisation or something of that ilk!
LikeLiked by 2 people
It wouldn’t matter what you told Blair. He only hears God’s voice telling him to invade Muslim countries…albeit through George W.
LikeLike
Don;t tell me God’s been speaking through George W Bush again? Probably he’s given up on Trumpy…specially after today!!!
LikeLike
You’d think that as a Professor of law he would stick to the letter of electoral law, nobody votes for a list MSP, they vote for a party representative. The then have to take what the party chose.
In some countries the voters get to choose, we don’t. It is an option we could and perhaps should have here.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Well, that’s the way I saw it. But clearly he thinks he’s much loved. I’m not sure exactly who sees the list. I don;t remember seeing who I was voting for in each of the parties.
LikeLike
Managing to get less than half the vote Labour got is some achievement. Just as well he is addicted to public sector pay. He wouldn’t last long in the private sector.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Imagine being less popular than Labour. Pretty good huh?
LikeLike
Don’t be so daft. He got 29,533 votes, so he has understated it slightly.
His constituency result is irrelevant. He didn’t win the constituency and he isn’t sitting for the constituency. He was first on the Conservatives’ Glasgow list. Thus it is absolutely legitimate to claim that the people who cast a list vote for the Tories in Glasgow were voting for him. These 29,533 people are indeed his mandate to sit in Holyrood.
If you want to have a go, point out that this was only 11.9% of the vote. That’s enough to get him a list seat because with PR someone has to sit in the sets the small parties are entitled to. It isn’t any justification for lording it over the party that got 44.8% of the same poll. that’s all.
I wish people would attack him on the grounds where he can be legitimately attacked rather than inviting ridicule by bringing up his irrelevant constituency result. (Which I think was actually higher in percentage terms than his list result!)
LikeLike
He didn’t get 29,533 votes. The Tories did.
LikeLike
Morag,
It is perfectly clear that he didn’t get the votes you say. A big perhaps, but just maybe the Conservative and Unionist Party did?
You cannot honestly see second votes as being for an individual rather than a Party, can you?
LikeLiked by 1 person
That’s how I saw it.
LikeLike
“The Conservative and Unionist Party” can’t sit as an MSP. You vote for people to sit in Holyrood, every time. The list candidates’ names are published. A list vote for a party is unquestionably a vote for the person on the top of that list to be an MSP. That was Tomkins. If you vote for a party on the list without knowing who is on that list and who you are voting for to be an MSP by casting that vote, you’re not much of a thinker, are you?
Remember back to the election, when many people on the independence side were debating whether to vote Green or even RISE on the list. These discussions were quite properly dominated by the identities of the people at the top of the respective lists, who would become MSPs if enough of these votes were cast. People were declining to vote Green on one list because they didn’t want to vote for Ross Greer, and advocating a Green vote somewhere else because Andy Wightman was in the running.
So it was a perfectly reasonable answer to the question he was asked. The appropriate reply of course is “and that was only 11.9% of the vote, not exactly enough to claim to speak for Scotland actually.” Instead people make prats of themselves by posting pictures of the constituency vote which is irrelevant as he wasn’t elected for a constituency and that isn’t his mandate. Claiming that someone who answered a question with the relevant answer, understating by a whopping 477 votes when he could have rounded to 29,500 without misrepresenting, is “not a professor of mathematics.” Good grief.
Seriously, you have to stop thinking of the list as a “second” vote, because in many ways it’s more important than the constituency vote as it determines the balance of the parliament and prevents the biggest party getting an overall majority in all but the most exceptional circumstances. And you have to realise that your list vote is for an actual person, and vote accordingly. It’s a vote for the people on the list and by casting that vote you are giving them a mandate.
LikeLike
Stats runes for whom?
LikeLiked by 1 person
the c29,000 is the total list votes for the conservatives in Glasgow so technically he’s right in a way. Not in the way that they were voting for him per se . But 29,000 odds is the vote for a Tory, any Tory in the list. More importantly 29000 folk in Glasgow voted Tory. F’ks that about?
LikeLiked by 2 people
We should all stand for failing political parties like the Tories. This candidate got, on first preference a measly 4.057 votes and gets elected via the list., which is very roughly a third of the winning SNP candidate. Then we too could stand on the sidelines and tell Nicola who had roughly 5 times the electoral vote, first preference, to her Tory opponent, to do as we say.
Probably this is an unworkable plan because I’d just end up agreeing with her.
I quite like it when my teams supporters go shhhh!….. to the oppositions fans. Perhaps we could adopt that approach in the political arena too?
LikeLiked by 1 person
LOl. I think the system is a bit broke. It is well intentioned, but it really doesn’t work well when you have a very popular FPTP party.
LikeLike
Well, it is scary, that there could be that many Tory voters in Glasgow
But the question to the good professor was how many votes he got. And he replied with how many votes the Tories got.
He came third when it was about him.
LikeLike
Yeah, bit of an also ran. Not exactly someone anyone here should see as credible.
LikeLike
Well, he’s clearly not. otherwise he would have been elected for himself, not anonymously for his party.
LikeLike
These were votes HE got. He was the person people voting Tory on the list were voting for to be an MSP. How can it be any clearer?
It so happens that he also stood in a constituency, where as it happens he got a slightly larger vote share than he got on the list. But that’s irrelevant. Whether or not a list MSP stood in a constituency – Sarwar didn’t if you remember, and come to think of it I’m not sure Kezia did either – is irrelevant to them being in Holyrood as MSPs.
The correct response, once Tomkins had answered the question, was to say, “And that was a whopping 11.9% of the vote, well done you. Now remind us why you’re claiming to speak for Scotland again?” That would have put his gas properly at a peep. Instead people let him right off the hook by demonstrating complete lack of comprehension about how the Holyrood elections work and how a list MSP derives his mandate.
LikeLike
I remember when the Euro elections first moved to PR after being FPTP. Suddenly instead of a bunch of FPTP constituencies we had a single Scotland-wide list. Shortly before the election my mother (then in her late 80s) said to me, “It’s all right, I understand it fine, I’m voting for Ian Hudgton.” I did a double-take, as Ian Hudgton had been MEP for the North-east and Mum lived in Lanarkshire. Then I realised she was absolutely right. Ian Hudgton was top of the SNP list for the whole of Scotland. She understood it better than I did at that point. Good for her.
I remember in the spring of last year when people were discussing their list votes. There was a lot of talk about whether to vote Green in different regions, based on who was at the top of the relevant list. Did you want to vote Ross Greer in? Or Patrick Harvie? Or Andy Wightman? Absolutely the right way to look at it. You’re always voting for a person to take a seat as an MSP.
Sure, many people don’t know who the list candidates are that they’re voting for. Many people don’t know the name of the constituency candidate they’re voting for! A few years ago at a Westminster election a polling station was sent the wrong ballot papers. (They were close to a constituency boundary.) Voting had been going on for THREE HOURS before anyone noticed! Dozens of people had just stuck their cross by the party they favoured without even looking at the candidate name. No doubt that happens a lot, when there’s no mistake to draw it to anyone’s attention. But it’s not reasonable to declare that these votes cannot be claimed by the candidate as votes for them.
If anyone votes blindly for a party without knowing who they’re voting for, that’s their problem and their lack of concern as to who represents them. Constituency or list. They’re still voting for a person, always.
Adam Tomkins was asked a question and he answered it correctly. 29,000. Or actually 29,533. The correct reply to that is, what only 11.9% of the vote?? Ha ha, that’s pathetic. And you strut around claiming to speak for Scotland? Give it up! That would at least show that you understood the system.
LikeLike
OK Point taken.
LikeLike