I’ve been travelling around a bit today – up to the beautiful house which the diocese owns and lets to clergy and others at Croftcarnoch. It’s up on a wonderfully alpine hill above the A9 between Pitlochry and Blair Atholl and there are highland cattle on the road up to it. Why didn’t I bring my camera? Strange about the election – which is actually quite intense. But in Ireland, either North or South, there would be three election posters on every lampost. Here – almost nothing.
The house martens are back – swooping and diving on Poppy as if they had never been away.
A couple of saturdays ago I drove over to Ayr. I forget exactly where it was (fortunately!), but one town along the A71 sticks in the memory for being absolutely littered with posters – every single lamppost for about a mile.
Different local authorities have different rules about election posters on lamposts. Some don’t allow them at all, some allow them everywhere, some give out lists to the political parties about which lamposts you can use. (Stirling, for example, has been quite strict about not posting on lamposts near road junctions and polling stations).
Lots of the local political activists would happily ban the practice as it is a lot of work, but you feel obliged to do it because the opposition can. There was a plan to ban in it in Stirling a few years back, but retained on the recommendation of the Returning Officer who was keen to retain Stirling’s traditional high turn-out and saw the election posters as an indication of activity which would get people out to vote.
It is also the case that political parties are getting much smarter about targetting areas where they need to do well. Profiling, they call it.