The Nice Guys of Politics?

Before I come to deal with the idiocy of Jamie Stone let me firstly say that today I spent a very productive day campaigning in Cumbernauld Town Centre to publicise the SNP campaign for smaller class sizes and then continuing the work of surveying the residents of Balloch on their opinions on the important matters of the day. I then returned home to catch a rerun bit of Nicol Stephen's leader's speech to the Liberal Democrats Scottish conference. For the bit I managed to stay awake to listen to I managed to catch some banalities about how negative Labour have been in the campaign (in all fairness to Nicol this is quite true) and how negative the SNP has been (not true) and how wonderfully positive his Scottish Lib Dems have been.

No surprises there then. As you might expect from a leader of a party, he talked up his own party and talked down the others. All in all, Nicol Stephen was trying to perpetuate that greatest myth of the body politic - that the Lib Dems are basically decent nice guys. However, just as he was making his claims of Liberal Democrat positivity one of his colleagues was making perhaps the most negative attacks of the campaign thus far - even nastier than anything thus far claimed by the Labour Party.

Jamie Stone MSP apparently claimed in an interview on television that the SNP are a party fuelled by "xenophobia". This outrageous remark sits in stark contrast to any claims by Nicol Stephen of a positive campaign and even Brian Taylor doing the interview clearly thought it was ludicrous. It also happens to be fundamentally untrue.

Xenophobia of course means the hatred of foreigners. Any reasonable person analysing the SNP's position will of course realise that this is far from the party's motivation for any of its priorities. Just because we seek independence for this country does not mean we hate people from other countries.

Indeed one of the strengths of the SNP is the breadth of people who are in it and who support it. I know of a number of people who moved to Scotland from elsewhere, choosing to make it their home who have come to realise the need for independence for the country. Many of them have in fact joined the SNP - some will be candidates for the party this May.

If we were a xenophobic movement would these people support us? Would they join us?

Would the gentleman who I spoke to today in Cumbernauld Town Centre who moved to Scotland from England nine years ago be a staunch SNP supporter and a firm believer in independence?

Hopefully people will see that Jamie Stone is talking through the proverbial hole in his heid. Hopefully they will also just see that the Liberal Democrats aren't quite the cuddly toy or nice guys they so love to make themselves out to be too.