Scottish Conference: Tavish Scott

Scottish conference concluded, as usual, with the leader's speech.

Tavish Scott gave us a powerful and passionate speech which was largely focused on the economy. I thought it was a pretty decent effort, with strong denunciations of Labour's failures and of the Gnats for their sole focus on promoting independence rather than trying to get the economy sorted.

There were several good lines and a few decent jokes as well, which seemed to go down well with the conference-goers. Tavish got the loudest applause for his demand that the Gnats should drop their demand for an independence referendum, although I don't entirely agree with his stance on that.

But there are a couple of things which irk me very slightly about the speech. One was a stylistic thing. The prompters which Tavish was using were set quite high, meaning that he was talking over our heads and looking away into the far distance. Even on screen, it looks as though he's speaking to someone fairly over our heads rather than to the person watching.

The other slightly annoying thing is not to do with the speech itself, but on our promoting it afterwards. I would have liked to have given you a link to the full speech or embedded a video in this posting but I can't find one. That's possibly something the party needs to address, maybe by finding a willing volunteer who could post it to Youtube or somewhere similar.

But these are just minor criticisms and shouldn't detract from what was a very good speech.