Jim Murphy, champion of Glasgow

While being interviewed by Brian Taylor about all this nasty Purcell business, which SSY has made passing comment on, Jim Murphy, Scottish Secretary (AKA official attempted whip of the entirety of Scotland) and knobhead, has said that he wishes everybody would stop being so nasty to Glasgow. The problem, of course, is that Jim seems to be getting the Glasgow Labour Party mixed up with Glasgow the city.

“The Labour Party is more than one individual. I think what happened to Steven Purcell was a horrible situation for himself and his family. It was a personal trauma for him, but there are wider issues about Labour in Glasgow.” Jim says. Resisting my language student temptation to analyse Jim’s interesting semantic choices (I guess all those drugs just ‘happened’ to jump up Steven Purcell’s nose), and the fact that it wasn’t just a tragedy for his family but a total abuse of Purcell’s office, from which he has escaped quickly and cleanly for a nice holiday in the sun, Jim’s right to say that there are wider issues about Labour in Glasgow.

School closures, service cuts and now their new plan to privatise Glasgow’s wonderful parks*; all of these are major issues that I have with Glasgow Labour. The fact is that they do a good enough job of besmirching their own reputation without Steven Purcell’s help.

Don't let those straws get their hooks into you, Jim!

Jim also says that “We should be proud of Glasgow in the same way we’re proud of Edinburgh, in the same way we’re proud of Dundee with the games industry, in the same way we’re proud of Aberdeen with the oil and gas industry.” and he’s right – Glasgow is a fantastic city. But the problem Jim has here is that nobody’s been saying that the whole of Glasgow’s been caning it up, palling about with super dodgy guys and abusing their office. This is just a really weak attempt to distract from the whole Purcell debacle. Take some friendly advice Jim; if you really want to upstage Purcellgate, then you’re gonnae need to check into rehab, disappear for three hours, come back covered in Llama shit and then run away to Antartica to live with the penguins.

* For more info and to help out with stopping this totally stupid plan, join the Facebook group here.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 26th, 2010 at 7:42 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.