Jack MacRoary's Guide to the General Election:
Episode Six
Genre: Humour
Swearwords: None.
Description: Every day's a school day...
_____________________________________________________________________
By the time you read this it will be just over a week till the General Election and things are really hotting up. My mum has been out and about with The Doctor and at the weekend she went down to East Renfrewshire to canvas against Jim Murphy. And dad went with her! You’d never guess it would you? But they take it pretty personally because of Uncle Tam. Mum is all for Social Justice and the dream never dying and getting fifty SNP MSP’s into Wastemonster, but Dad says he’ll just be happy if Smurphy (as he calls him –when he’s being polite) gets his arse kicked. He said he would chap doors on the ‘anyone but the Smurf’ ticket. Mum gave him a dirty look and he said he was only joking. The candidate to beat Smurf is Kirsten Oswald and she was a big Yesser last year.
Politics aside, you might be worried what happened on the farm with my dad away for the weekend. Don’t worry. John and Heather took charge. Well, really Heather takes charge and John does what he’s told. It was kind of weird. Kind of like having your big brother be your dad and his girlfriend be your mum. But anyway, I was busy all the time doing my homework. I got to stay in Mum and Dad’s room and Heather and John stayed in our room. Which John had even tidied up before she came. Wonders, as mum says, will never cease.
Election fever has hit DrumTumshie Academy as well. Mr Marker is like a man possessed. You might remember he’s my Modern Studies teacher and he’s always on about comparative analysis and primary source materials. And you know how people always think that kids just write about what they did in their holidays – well this week I’m going to write about what I did in school. Because politics has made it into the classroom big-style this week. And because it might be a long time since you were in school, I thought you might like an inside glimpse of what it’s like in a classroom these days.
Mr Marker set us a task. For homework he said we had to compare the Scottish and UK manifestos of all the parties. They are nearly 60 pages long each, and so that almost caused a riot. So he backed down a bit, and said we had to work in groups, pick a party and compare its UK and its Scottish Manifesto. And if we picked the SNP then we had to compare with UKIP because SNP doesn’t have a UK manifesto and UKIP doesn’t have a Scottish manifesto. Well each manifesto is about 60 pages long so that took care of my weekend. Brian came round and worked with me.
Mr Marker said that you had to read the whole thing because the summaries only tell you what they want you to focus on – not the bigger picture. And Brian said it sounded like manifestos are a bit like a treasure hunt. They have lots of promises but they hide things away and you have to go looking for the clues. So he was looking forward to spending the weekend on a political treasure hunt with me, but when it came down to it, the SNP manifesto isn’t like a treasure hunt at all, but it’s not really like ‘The Dream Shall Never Die’ either. But none of the good ideas or promises were hidden at least. And we left the other member of our group, a girl called Mhari, to do the UKIP manifesto and then we got together before the next class to compare our notes – because we didn’t want to read the UKIP manifesto, and Brian didn’t want to invite Mhari to come on our treasure hunt weekend either.
But to take you back to the class before the weekend homework, Mr Marker wanted us to find the manifestos that we were going to pick and he gave us two questions to answer, but I’ve put them into one answer here to spare you time. Question 1 was: How easy are the manifestos to find? Because it’s not like you can walk into a library (I tried) or a newsagent (I tried) and actually buy them. They are not giving them away in the streets and there aren’t any copies in DrumTumshie Academy.
While everyone has been going on in the news about these manifestos, no one has been making a big thing in the news (that I’ve seen) or out on the streets of DrumTumshie about how to actually get hold of them. Brian suggested that maybe they know how boring they are and they’re not that proud of them. Mr Marker says it’s up to us to stay informed, but when Alex Salmond published his book it was all over the media (even though now in the election they have all shut up about him and turned their attention to Nicola Sturgeon – at least they’ve worked out she is the leader!) and so I think that if they’ve gone to all the trouble of making these shiny, glossy manifesto things, we should all get the chance to own one and read it.
Mr Marker said since we are now the internet generation the obvious place to look was ONLINE. So our work in class (before the homework) was to find the websites for all the parties and write about how easy they each made it for you to download their manifesto.
And Question 2 was: What kind of first impression do you get? The first impression I got was that there was going to be a lot of reading. But that’s not what Mr Marker meant. He meant what impression of the party and their beliefs do you form from their websites and manifestos.
Remember my group is Brian the Brain and a girl called Mhari (which you pronounce Vaa-ree in case you don’t know – because it’s a Gaelic name, though she ‘doesn’t have the Gaelic’ because her parents moved here from Cumbernauld last summer.)
So in case you are interested here are our findings of finding the party manifestos online and the websites themselves:
Scottish Conservative (easier to find a pregnant Panda in Scotland, dad said when I told him!) The manifesto has a cheesy picture of Ruth Davidson and David Cameron. Not a picture for the classroom wall! And the website has another cheesy picture of Ruth saying ‘We’ve got more in common than you might think.’ When we read it out the whole class chanted: ‘Aye, Right.’
Then it says all these things she’s voting for:
I’m voting for a break for low paid workers
I’m voting for schools that end inequality
I’m voting for more nurses in our hospitals
I’m voting for a local police force
I’m voting for a fairer Scotland.
And Brian said – so is she voting SNP? And Mhari laughed out loud so hard that Mr Marker came over to stop us ‘carrying on’ and when Mhari told him what Brian had said, Mr Marker told the whole class and we all fell around laughing for a good five minutes. Which is the one thing I can say for the Scottish Conservative website manifesto… I never thought I’d get such a good laugh out of it. It was easy to download straight from the site. But I don’t think the group who have to read it for homework will be laughing. The logline of the UK manifesto is less funny and more scary. It has Ruth and David grinning cheesily and says ‘Strong leadership, a brighter, more secure future.’ While spending money on upgrading Trident, I don’t think so!
Scottish Green Party – on their website (which is green of course) you have to click the Westminster 2015 tab or on the news tab and it gives you the picture of the manifesto. Click on it to download. You have to click on the picture of the manifesto (you have to guess to do that, it doesn’t tell you) and you have an easily downloadable version. Easy enough to do which was good. Their website just says JOIN US. No bells and whistles with them. And all I can say is that if you want a progressive country but for some reason don’t want independence, the Greens are the next best thing. Their manifesto logline is An economy for the people, a society for all. We never had time to look at the UK Green Party one I’m afraid because the bell went. I wish we’d left the Conservatives till last, then we wouldn’t have had to see the cheesy smiles.
Scottish Liberal Democrats – the Scottish Liberal Democrats had that sick making seventies yellow wallpaper which quite takes your mind off everything else. The front of their website just says ‘help us win in May’ and then there’s a load of stuff dissing the SNP! Mr Marker said it reminded him of a poem ‘not waving but drowning.’ And the girls laughed. The boys tried not to, because he was talking about poetry and not the poetry of Rabbie Burns. Their actual manifesto logline is ‘Stronger Economy. Fairer Society. Opportunity for Everyone.’ BUT it took us over 10 minutes to find out how to download their manifesto. I said we should just read it online, but Brian kept saying that the task was to ‘download’ the manifestos and we’d get fewer marks if we didn’t do the task properly, so we had to keep trying. However angry their site made me, and it was making me very angry I can tell you!
You go to their website and its one of the drop down tabs but you can only seem to read it in a little box and in a BIG box towards the top they are saying
The SNP have centralised the life out of Scotland
Over the past seven years the SNP Government has systematically and categorically stripped powers away from local authorities and communities and centralised decisions in their power block in Edinburgh. Read more (but I didn’t want to read more, because I’m supposed to be finding out about their manifesto, not listen to them bitching about the SNP!)
Eventually, after a lot of surfing we found a downloadable copy on a site www.landlords.org.uk but it was of the UK Lib Dems. This was when Brian said he thought it was like a treasure hunt. But it wasn’t. It was just annoying.
WE clicked on the manifesto in the Scottish website and it went to a google drive file which we still couldn’t download and then we went to ‘open original document’ and then we were able to save the downloadable manifesto there. And this is the full link, which I just thought might interest Mr Marker at least http://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/no2nuisancecalls/pages/1084/attachments/original/1429621095/Scottish_Liberal_Democrats_General_Election_2015_Manifesto-Updated.pdf?1429621095
Have they never heard of bitly? I don’t think we were at fault here and I don’t think it was Google either. But I can’t work out why it should be so difficult to download a manifesto. Maybe they don’t want people to have hard copies in case they can’t keep their promises in future like before!
Scottish Labour – I found The Labour Party Manifesto quite quickly. It looks like a lot of money has been thrown at it to make it a ‘responsive’ type website. It allows you to choose which 3 policies interest you most, to ‘build’ your own manifesto! If only, eh? If we can be trusted to build our own manifesto, why can’t we be trusted to govern our own country?
Then Brian pointed out it was the UK one not the Scottish Labour Party one, so we googled that (and yes, google is a proper word in the dictionary and everything these days!) and we got the Scottish one. Which is a lot less zippy than the UK one http://www.scottishlabour.org.uk/blog/entry/the-scottish-labour-manifesto-2015 (Mr Marker said it looked more like Stalinist Russia, whereas the UK one looks like Russia advertising the Olympics – I think he thought he was making a joke!) And in order to download the manifesto you have to join Scribd. Which I think is stupid because you should just be able to download it then and there. But then it turned out that this is the blog not the website homepage, so we surfed around some more and found that Google hadn’t actually sent us direct to the main site. It just goes to show that Google can only help you so far.
When we told Mr Marker he said it was an example of how you can’t trust algorithms over common sense! He never misses a chance to tell us not to rely too much on Wikipedia or Google or all that – but he still made us do the manifesto search online after all!
Anyway the official site has lots of bells and whistles and then when you click to read the manifesto, before you can, you have to read a message from Jim Murphy aka ‘Smurfy’. Ugh. It starts:
A note from Jim Murphy
Scotland is desperate for change. We know the last few years haven’t been good enough. This manifesto sets out details of our plan. What we will do to make the change.
It’s good that he realises we want change. But why didn’t he help us get independence then, which is the change most of us wanted. Now most of us just want him out. That’s the change we want to see in DrumTumshie anyway.
And he goes on quite a bit before you get the chance to download the manifesto, but at least you don’t have to join Scribd to get it. But there doesn’t seem to be a log-line that I could find. Either ‘this manifesto is for you’ or screeds of stuff about Scottish working people.
Scottish National Party – On the SNP website there’s a rolling box of things (at least not Ruth Davidson’s cheesy face) and if you press the first which says ‘Discover the Benefits of voting SNP on 7th May – More SNP seats. More powers for Scotland’ just below it gives you a pretty simple link Download the SNP manifesto here or click the PDF’s at the bottom of the page. No treasure hunt. Just a direct link.
Plus on the right-hand side is a picture of Nicola Sturgeon which says ‘Stronger for Scotland Download the Manifesto’. So with them you do get the idea that they really want you to read the Manifesto! And I don’t think that’s just because it has a picture of Nicola Sturgeon on the front cover which is a lot more attractive than any of the other pictures – but that wouldn’t be
‘Stronger for Scotland’ video, and that gave Mr Marker the idea that we should all go and find the campaign videos and compare them. Which is homework for next week. All this homework is fairly stacking up. I am going to be very glad when this election is over.
Last and VERY definitely least is the UKIP party. They weren’t the last one we looked at, that was the Greens because we ran out of time, but they are the last alphabetically AND in terms of sense or importance to us.
Of course there isn’t a Scottish UKIP manifesto, because they don’t really believe in Scotland any more than in Europe, so we had to look at their horrid purple UK (or English) site. You can download it easily enough although it was pretty slow to load – and then you are treated to their logline ‘Believe in Britain’. No punches pulled there, eh? Don’t put that head to head with ‘The Dream Shall Never Die’ and expect change out of a Euro! That’s what Mr Marker said before he started talking about the medium being in the message and a load of things I didn’t get.
I think that might have been the most tiring class I’ve ever been in, in my life. I’m beginning to see why everyone just resorts to sound-bites because I was exhausted before even starting to read the manifesto. And you might be tired, too, so here’s a quick guide that we made in class this week when we all came back with our findings:
I call it Jack MacRoary’s quick guide to the parties and their positions:
‘We’ve got more in common than you think.’
‘Stronger for Scotland.’
‘Join us.’
‘Stronger Economy. Fairer Society. Opportunity for Everyone.’
‘This manifesto is for you.’
‘Help us win in May.’
‘Strong leadership, a Brighter, more secure future.’
‘An economy for the people, a society for all.’
‘Believe in Britain.’
And Mr Marker liked this so much (he didn’t realise Brian had forgotten to put which party said which – he thought it was deliberate) that he said we should set a quiz for the Year 7’s to see if they could guess which party it was that said which thing. And he gave my group extra marks for coming up with an idea to ‘engage young people in politics’. Brian wanted a badge but sadly there were no badges on offer. He said he’s going to go home and make one.
Mr Marker said we are now getting to the meat in the sandwich. Which sounds a lot more interesting than it is. He’s actually talking about the content of the manifestos, behind all the glitz, glamour, cheesy grins, promises and hidden get-out clauses. Can’t he just say so? Brian is now looking forward to comparing ham and lamb and beef sandwiches. Come to think of it, a good quiz would be to work out what kind of a sandwich each political party is. I think he’s going to tell Mr Marker that and hope that we get another medal for ‘engaging young people in politics’. I don’t think we will. But I gave Brian an SNP badge and a Yes badge because my mum has loads of them around the house.
Even though it’s been hard work and a lot of it pretty boring, I think I’m beginning to see what Mr Marker means about how you have to go to primary sources and then read it all very carefully, because you can’t cast your vote based on the headlines or loglines or sound-bites, can you? And of course I’m only sharing my experiences with you to encourage you to go back to the primary sources yourself. Do it before polling day. Please. Remember, I don’t have a vote and you do. So you do owe it to my generation to stay informed and make the right choices. Sorry I haven’t been able to write more about potatoes and ‘real’ life – but this election hasn’t just taken over social and broadcast media, it’s taken over all our lives. Next week’s episode will be just the day before the election and as we all know – a week is a long time in politics, so who knows what will have happened in DrumTumshie and the world by then. I hope you can stop by next week and find out.
Swearwords: None.
Description: Every day's a school day...
_____________________________________________________________________
By the time you read this it will be just over a week till the General Election and things are really hotting up. My mum has been out and about with The Doctor and at the weekend she went down to East Renfrewshire to canvas against Jim Murphy. And dad went with her! You’d never guess it would you? But they take it pretty personally because of Uncle Tam. Mum is all for Social Justice and the dream never dying and getting fifty SNP MSP’s into Wastemonster, but Dad says he’ll just be happy if Smurphy (as he calls him –when he’s being polite) gets his arse kicked. He said he would chap doors on the ‘anyone but the Smurf’ ticket. Mum gave him a dirty look and he said he was only joking. The candidate to beat Smurf is Kirsten Oswald and she was a big Yesser last year.
Politics aside, you might be worried what happened on the farm with my dad away for the weekend. Don’t worry. John and Heather took charge. Well, really Heather takes charge and John does what he’s told. It was kind of weird. Kind of like having your big brother be your dad and his girlfriend be your mum. But anyway, I was busy all the time doing my homework. I got to stay in Mum and Dad’s room and Heather and John stayed in our room. Which John had even tidied up before she came. Wonders, as mum says, will never cease.
Election fever has hit DrumTumshie Academy as well. Mr Marker is like a man possessed. You might remember he’s my Modern Studies teacher and he’s always on about comparative analysis and primary source materials. And you know how people always think that kids just write about what they did in their holidays – well this week I’m going to write about what I did in school. Because politics has made it into the classroom big-style this week. And because it might be a long time since you were in school, I thought you might like an inside glimpse of what it’s like in a classroom these days.
Mr Marker set us a task. For homework he said we had to compare the Scottish and UK manifestos of all the parties. They are nearly 60 pages long each, and so that almost caused a riot. So he backed down a bit, and said we had to work in groups, pick a party and compare its UK and its Scottish Manifesto. And if we picked the SNP then we had to compare with UKIP because SNP doesn’t have a UK manifesto and UKIP doesn’t have a Scottish manifesto. Well each manifesto is about 60 pages long so that took care of my weekend. Brian came round and worked with me.
Mr Marker said that you had to read the whole thing because the summaries only tell you what they want you to focus on – not the bigger picture. And Brian said it sounded like manifestos are a bit like a treasure hunt. They have lots of promises but they hide things away and you have to go looking for the clues. So he was looking forward to spending the weekend on a political treasure hunt with me, but when it came down to it, the SNP manifesto isn’t like a treasure hunt at all, but it’s not really like ‘The Dream Shall Never Die’ either. But none of the good ideas or promises were hidden at least. And we left the other member of our group, a girl called Mhari, to do the UKIP manifesto and then we got together before the next class to compare our notes – because we didn’t want to read the UKIP manifesto, and Brian didn’t want to invite Mhari to come on our treasure hunt weekend either.
But to take you back to the class before the weekend homework, Mr Marker wanted us to find the manifestos that we were going to pick and he gave us two questions to answer, but I’ve put them into one answer here to spare you time. Question 1 was: How easy are the manifestos to find? Because it’s not like you can walk into a library (I tried) or a newsagent (I tried) and actually buy them. They are not giving them away in the streets and there aren’t any copies in DrumTumshie Academy.
While everyone has been going on in the news about these manifestos, no one has been making a big thing in the news (that I’ve seen) or out on the streets of DrumTumshie about how to actually get hold of them. Brian suggested that maybe they know how boring they are and they’re not that proud of them. Mr Marker says it’s up to us to stay informed, but when Alex Salmond published his book it was all over the media (even though now in the election they have all shut up about him and turned their attention to Nicola Sturgeon – at least they’ve worked out she is the leader!) and so I think that if they’ve gone to all the trouble of making these shiny, glossy manifesto things, we should all get the chance to own one and read it.
Mr Marker said since we are now the internet generation the obvious place to look was ONLINE. So our work in class (before the homework) was to find the websites for all the parties and write about how easy they each made it for you to download their manifesto.
And Question 2 was: What kind of first impression do you get? The first impression I got was that there was going to be a lot of reading. But that’s not what Mr Marker meant. He meant what impression of the party and their beliefs do you form from their websites and manifestos.
Remember my group is Brian the Brain and a girl called Mhari (which you pronounce Vaa-ree in case you don’t know – because it’s a Gaelic name, though she ‘doesn’t have the Gaelic’ because her parents moved here from Cumbernauld last summer.)
So in case you are interested here are our findings of finding the party manifestos online and the websites themselves:
Scottish Conservative (easier to find a pregnant Panda in Scotland, dad said when I told him!) The manifesto has a cheesy picture of Ruth Davidson and David Cameron. Not a picture for the classroom wall! And the website has another cheesy picture of Ruth saying ‘We’ve got more in common than you might think.’ When we read it out the whole class chanted: ‘Aye, Right.’
Then it says all these things she’s voting for:
I’m voting for a break for low paid workers
I’m voting for schools that end inequality
I’m voting for more nurses in our hospitals
I’m voting for a local police force
I’m voting for a fairer Scotland.
And Brian said – so is she voting SNP? And Mhari laughed out loud so hard that Mr Marker came over to stop us ‘carrying on’ and when Mhari told him what Brian had said, Mr Marker told the whole class and we all fell around laughing for a good five minutes. Which is the one thing I can say for the Scottish Conservative website manifesto… I never thought I’d get such a good laugh out of it. It was easy to download straight from the site. But I don’t think the group who have to read it for homework will be laughing. The logline of the UK manifesto is less funny and more scary. It has Ruth and David grinning cheesily and says ‘Strong leadership, a brighter, more secure future.’ While spending money on upgrading Trident, I don’t think so!
Scottish Green Party – on their website (which is green of course) you have to click the Westminster 2015 tab or on the news tab and it gives you the picture of the manifesto. Click on it to download. You have to click on the picture of the manifesto (you have to guess to do that, it doesn’t tell you) and you have an easily downloadable version. Easy enough to do which was good. Their website just says JOIN US. No bells and whistles with them. And all I can say is that if you want a progressive country but for some reason don’t want independence, the Greens are the next best thing. Their manifesto logline is An economy for the people, a society for all. We never had time to look at the UK Green Party one I’m afraid because the bell went. I wish we’d left the Conservatives till last, then we wouldn’t have had to see the cheesy smiles.
Scottish Liberal Democrats – the Scottish Liberal Democrats had that sick making seventies yellow wallpaper which quite takes your mind off everything else. The front of their website just says ‘help us win in May’ and then there’s a load of stuff dissing the SNP! Mr Marker said it reminded him of a poem ‘not waving but drowning.’ And the girls laughed. The boys tried not to, because he was talking about poetry and not the poetry of Rabbie Burns. Their actual manifesto logline is ‘Stronger Economy. Fairer Society. Opportunity for Everyone.’ BUT it took us over 10 minutes to find out how to download their manifesto. I said we should just read it online, but Brian kept saying that the task was to ‘download’ the manifestos and we’d get fewer marks if we didn’t do the task properly, so we had to keep trying. However angry their site made me, and it was making me very angry I can tell you!
You go to their website and its one of the drop down tabs but you can only seem to read it in a little box and in a BIG box towards the top they are saying
The SNP have centralised the life out of Scotland
Over the past seven years the SNP Government has systematically and categorically stripped powers away from local authorities and communities and centralised decisions in their power block in Edinburgh. Read more (but I didn’t want to read more, because I’m supposed to be finding out about their manifesto, not listen to them bitching about the SNP!)
Eventually, after a lot of surfing we found a downloadable copy on a site www.landlords.org.uk but it was of the UK Lib Dems. This was when Brian said he thought it was like a treasure hunt. But it wasn’t. It was just annoying.
WE clicked on the manifesto in the Scottish website and it went to a google drive file which we still couldn’t download and then we went to ‘open original document’ and then we were able to save the downloadable manifesto there. And this is the full link, which I just thought might interest Mr Marker at least http://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/no2nuisancecalls/pages/1084/attachments/original/1429621095/Scottish_Liberal_Democrats_General_Election_2015_Manifesto-Updated.pdf?1429621095
Have they never heard of bitly? I don’t think we were at fault here and I don’t think it was Google either. But I can’t work out why it should be so difficult to download a manifesto. Maybe they don’t want people to have hard copies in case they can’t keep their promises in future like before!
Scottish Labour – I found The Labour Party Manifesto quite quickly. It looks like a lot of money has been thrown at it to make it a ‘responsive’ type website. It allows you to choose which 3 policies interest you most, to ‘build’ your own manifesto! If only, eh? If we can be trusted to build our own manifesto, why can’t we be trusted to govern our own country?
Then Brian pointed out it was the UK one not the Scottish Labour Party one, so we googled that (and yes, google is a proper word in the dictionary and everything these days!) and we got the Scottish one. Which is a lot less zippy than the UK one http://www.scottishlabour.org.uk/blog/entry/the-scottish-labour-manifesto-2015 (Mr Marker said it looked more like Stalinist Russia, whereas the UK one looks like Russia advertising the Olympics – I think he thought he was making a joke!) And in order to download the manifesto you have to join Scribd. Which I think is stupid because you should just be able to download it then and there. But then it turned out that this is the blog not the website homepage, so we surfed around some more and found that Google hadn’t actually sent us direct to the main site. It just goes to show that Google can only help you so far.
When we told Mr Marker he said it was an example of how you can’t trust algorithms over common sense! He never misses a chance to tell us not to rely too much on Wikipedia or Google or all that – but he still made us do the manifesto search online after all!
Anyway the official site has lots of bells and whistles and then when you click to read the manifesto, before you can, you have to read a message from Jim Murphy aka ‘Smurfy’. Ugh. It starts:
A note from Jim Murphy
Scotland is desperate for change. We know the last few years haven’t been good enough. This manifesto sets out details of our plan. What we will do to make the change.
It’s good that he realises we want change. But why didn’t he help us get independence then, which is the change most of us wanted. Now most of us just want him out. That’s the change we want to see in DrumTumshie anyway.
And he goes on quite a bit before you get the chance to download the manifesto, but at least you don’t have to join Scribd to get it. But there doesn’t seem to be a log-line that I could find. Either ‘this manifesto is for you’ or screeds of stuff about Scottish working people.
Scottish National Party – On the SNP website there’s a rolling box of things (at least not Ruth Davidson’s cheesy face) and if you press the first which says ‘Discover the Benefits of voting SNP on 7th May – More SNP seats. More powers for Scotland’ just below it gives you a pretty simple link Download the SNP manifesto here or click the PDF’s at the bottom of the page. No treasure hunt. Just a direct link.
Plus on the right-hand side is a picture of Nicola Sturgeon which says ‘Stronger for Scotland Download the Manifesto’. So with them you do get the idea that they really want you to read the Manifesto! And I don’t think that’s just because it has a picture of Nicola Sturgeon on the front cover which is a lot more attractive than any of the other pictures – but that wouldn’t be
‘Stronger for Scotland’ video, and that gave Mr Marker the idea that we should all go and find the campaign videos and compare them. Which is homework for next week. All this homework is fairly stacking up. I am going to be very glad when this election is over.
Last and VERY definitely least is the UKIP party. They weren’t the last one we looked at, that was the Greens because we ran out of time, but they are the last alphabetically AND in terms of sense or importance to us.
Of course there isn’t a Scottish UKIP manifesto, because they don’t really believe in Scotland any more than in Europe, so we had to look at their horrid purple UK (or English) site. You can download it easily enough although it was pretty slow to load – and then you are treated to their logline ‘Believe in Britain’. No punches pulled there, eh? Don’t put that head to head with ‘The Dream Shall Never Die’ and expect change out of a Euro! That’s what Mr Marker said before he started talking about the medium being in the message and a load of things I didn’t get.
I think that might have been the most tiring class I’ve ever been in, in my life. I’m beginning to see why everyone just resorts to sound-bites because I was exhausted before even starting to read the manifesto. And you might be tired, too, so here’s a quick guide that we made in class this week when we all came back with our findings:
I call it Jack MacRoary’s quick guide to the parties and their positions:
‘We’ve got more in common than you think.’
‘Stronger for Scotland.’
‘Join us.’
‘Stronger Economy. Fairer Society. Opportunity for Everyone.’
‘This manifesto is for you.’
‘Help us win in May.’
‘Strong leadership, a Brighter, more secure future.’
‘An economy for the people, a society for all.’
‘Believe in Britain.’
And Mr Marker liked this so much (he didn’t realise Brian had forgotten to put which party said which – he thought it was deliberate) that he said we should set a quiz for the Year 7’s to see if they could guess which party it was that said which thing. And he gave my group extra marks for coming up with an idea to ‘engage young people in politics’. Brian wanted a badge but sadly there were no badges on offer. He said he’s going to go home and make one.
Mr Marker said we are now getting to the meat in the sandwich. Which sounds a lot more interesting than it is. He’s actually talking about the content of the manifestos, behind all the glitz, glamour, cheesy grins, promises and hidden get-out clauses. Can’t he just say so? Brian is now looking forward to comparing ham and lamb and beef sandwiches. Come to think of it, a good quiz would be to work out what kind of a sandwich each political party is. I think he’s going to tell Mr Marker that and hope that we get another medal for ‘engaging young people in politics’. I don’t think we will. But I gave Brian an SNP badge and a Yes badge because my mum has loads of them around the house.
Even though it’s been hard work and a lot of it pretty boring, I think I’m beginning to see what Mr Marker means about how you have to go to primary sources and then read it all very carefully, because you can’t cast your vote based on the headlines or loglines or sound-bites, can you? And of course I’m only sharing my experiences with you to encourage you to go back to the primary sources yourself. Do it before polling day. Please. Remember, I don’t have a vote and you do. So you do owe it to my generation to stay informed and make the right choices. Sorry I haven’t been able to write more about potatoes and ‘real’ life – but this election hasn’t just taken over social and broadcast media, it’s taken over all our lives. Next week’s episode will be just the day before the election and as we all know – a week is a long time in politics, so who knows what will have happened in DrumTumshie and the world by then. I hope you can stop by next week and find out.
About the Author
Jack MacRoary, also known locally as the Bard of DrumTumshie, comes from the small farming community of Tattybogle, which he has singlehandedly put ‘on the map’ through his fame. After bursting onto the literary cultural scene in August 2012 when he appeared at the inaugural Edinburgh eBook Festival, Jack now attends DrumTumshie Academy. His current ebooks are Tales from Tattybogle (available from Amazon here and Kobo here) and More Tales from Tattybogle (available from Amazon here and Kobo here). He is also the first McStorytellers McSerial writer.
Jack lives on a farm with his dad, mum, older brother John and a range of animals and pets, including Dug (the cat), Bisum (the dog) and Micro (the pig). His ebooks give an insight into rural life, as well as providing an insightful commentary on Scots culture.
Follow Jack on Facebook here.
Jack lives on a farm with his dad, mum, older brother John and a range of animals and pets, including Dug (the cat), Bisum (the dog) and Micro (the pig). His ebooks give an insight into rural life, as well as providing an insightful commentary on Scots culture.
Follow Jack on Facebook here.