What about the electorate - stupid?

The Andersonstown News this week is full of victory for the Sinn Fein camp, and while their is honour in them holding true to their ideals, one has to wonder where the electorate features in all of this. This isn't about being the biggest party, nor is it about getting Martin McGuinness into the first minister position, this is about how to serve the electorate. No where in any write up in the Andersonstown news do I see the word 'cuts', and how Sinn Fein as an abstentionist party will deal with them. It's about victory, and that is honourable, but to concentrate on victory, or who is the biggest boy in the playground is to miss the point entirely.

 So they want to be a little smug to their detractors, and say to them that Adams won in the face of media difficulty, but that media difficulty was going to happen whether there'd been a general election or not. The personal vote of the sitting west Belfast MP went down by 2,000 - thats a significant number of votes, and the voting turn out was down. Thats not something to be over the moon about.

Lets see how they handle the severe cuts coming to their electorate. Sinn Fein cannot ask people to protest against cuts they are in power to implement, they are a party in power not opposition, they cannot be in a coalition that will oversee cuts and then complain about the cuts, that simply isn't going to wash when people feel necessity knocking on the door.