@Jhughes1 @heatherbell59 - they were two completely different jobs! Kevin was a SPAD. Murray was employed by the Parliamentary Group & headed up the Central Office for the Group.

@strathearnrose @heatherbell59 Kevin ran comms. Effectively

@Jhughes1 @heatherbell59 - the roles and functions were and are different. It isn’t fair to compare the two

@strathearnrose @heatherbell59 main point is, since his appointment Foote has not got us into positive positions in the media. Too defensive. Too passive

@Jhughes1 @heatherbell59 Then have a moan about the senior SPADS & the Comms SPADS who do that job for the government.

@strathearnrose @heatherbell59 please outline what positive impact he has had.
Followed the media team he leads and his own media accounts assiduously. Not seen a single positive impact.

We have had a poor time of it over the last 3 years in media terms. His job. Not done well.

@Jhughes1 @strathearnrose @heatherbell59 I think there needs to be some realism attached to these expectations around press coverage. There is no individual or PR strategy that could persuade our, almost entirely, unionist media to write/say nice things about independence or the SNP. It will never happen and it’s a bit mad to imagine it could.

@angrymunchkin @strathearnrose @heatherbell59 but there are refutations of smears and misinformation that ordinary posters are able to go to source material to show up the lie. And we don’t do that. I’ve done it myself. It just smacks of amateurism.

Put simply, we’re not assertive enough. We never get in first and as Michael Marra said bad news spreads like wildfire. Good news travels slow.

@Jhughes1 @strathearnrose @heatherbell59 is there an example you can think of? I think most of the mud gets refuted, even if that isn’t platformed as prominently or treated as credibly as whatever the original nonsense was (obviously by the same outlets). It’s also true that much of the ‘coverage’ of independence is little more than trolling and that when we respond we end up feeding the beast.

@angrymunchkin @strathearnrose @heatherbell59 GERS. Every year. Who decided that the best response to GERS was to accept it? The worst PR decision ever made.
Christ, even Jim Cuthbert who set it up and collated it for decades has a list of issues with it as long as your arm. We have never utilised him, Margaret C, Murphy, Mark Blyth and others in any way at all. We sit back, cede the battleground to unionist crowing which is now stuck in the minds of even our own supporters.

@Jhughes1 @strathearnrose @heatherbell59 yeah got to give you that. To be fair though that’s not the PR, tactically (inexplicably) a decision was taken to accept it. There’s no polishing that particular turd.

@angrymunchkin @strathearnrose @heatherbell59 it still requires a media strategy.

That strategy at the moment seems to be “say nothing. Do nothing. It will all go away”
Just not good enough.

@Jhughes1 @angrymunchkin @strathearnrose @heatherbell59 it has always been a mystery to me why the Scottish Government do not produce their own figures.  At least then there would be some attempt at balance.

@peterbrown @Jhughes1 @angrymunchkin @strathearnrose @heatherbell59 you can hear the screams now from the pro union media and politicians claiming we’re lying etc. But agree a decent forecast based on a combination of actuals & estimates (what we would spend if in a Indy country) could be a persuasive thing.

@peterbrown @angrymunchkin @strathearnrose @heatherbell59 don’t even need to produce own figures (although that would be a good thing), just need to hammer home the single salient point agreed by all serious contributors to the debate.

“GERS tell us nothing about the finances of an independent Scotland”. Nor does it tell us about the whole Scottish economy. Simply Estimates of govt expenditure and revenues.

@peterbrown @angrymunchkin @strathearnrose @heatherbell59 masses of economic data is not disaggregated, with lots of brass plate allocation of funds which overestimates London & SE at the expense of the countries and regions.

Scotland is a “data desert” in the eyes of most professional economists. Some of us would say deliberately sonce the late 1920s

@angrymunchkin @strathearnrose @heatherbell59 here’s another. All over the media, not a peep from the SNP media team nor the comms SpADs at Holyrood.

Why does it take a blogger to do the hard work. The SNP literally pay people to do this

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=pfbid0eyENX1tsaEDtB4n8xTpT53hbreCPgFPQrZHAeFsFNesXoHRuYo2ddy9rtRLKtUdWl&id=100009118774105

@Jhughes1 @heatherbell59 I am not going to make Murray a scapegoat - sorry. There’s an entire Comms team in the FM’s Office you know. He wasn’t employed by the government or the party. To load all your complaints on Murray is not appropriate

@strathearnrose @heatherbell59 I’m not. But thanks for the politicians response. Deflect and move on.

Not good enough. I speak for thousands of members when I say, across the board, the party must do better. If you want me to continue to canvass, chap doors, deliver leaflets and all those activist things, do better. Start fighting back

@strathearnrose @heatherbell59 and you’re closer to it, what complaints have you made?

@strathearnrose @heatherbell59 to put it simply, we need a better, stronger, more assertive media strategy.

Stop being a punchbag and come out fighting. Stop relying on us to do the work.

Richard Murphy is currently doing more for independence than SNP media teams.

@Jhughes1 @strathearnrose @heatherbell59 nothing against Richard Murphy and he has he moments, but his views are simply his strong opinions on events and not necessarily the answer. He’s an accountant who admits he loves the limelight and who has re-invented himself as a political economist - his economic views are rarely in sync with anyone in the economist community. The man behind Corbyn’s crazy economics. Just think before accepting everything he says as scripture.

@Lassielmr @strathearnrose @heatherbell59 “reinvented himself”.

Right, so City University and Sheffield University have been duped into giving him professorships in that subject?
@ionafyfe I may ask, what the hell is your qualification in the field?

@strathearnrose @heatherbell59 so you’re admitting they’re not doing their job well, either