Our friend Josie lives in Glasgow and her most recent MP is/was the SNP's Alison Thewliss.
Josie has been working away from home lately and so she missed a surprise visit from Alison. The visit came in the wake of an official House of Commons letter (oooh, that paper's lovely!) in reply to a letter Josie had sent 18 months previously.
We won't detail the content of Josie's original letter and we haven't seen the reply from Alison (or, we should say, her 'office') but Josie tells us that she was, basically, told that Thewliss couldn't help.
An obvious question arises - if she couldn't help Josie and had neglected to contact her for a year-and-a-half after receiving her letter (which was sent via theyworkforyou.com) then why turn up at her front door (which, by the way, is on the top floor of a four-storey tenement) and ask for her by name?
Most people never clap eyes on their local MP or MSP and some struggle even to name them. Only a vanishingly small number of constituents ever contact their elected representatives and it is well-nigh impossible to find any hard data on satisfaction ratings.
That makes Josie of particular interest to characters such as Thewliss who are now facing imminent unemployment.
Thewliss, like all other MPs and MSPs, will have a list of 'active' constituents who have contacted her in recent years. More specifically, she'll have a list of those who, for whatever reason, have expressed dissatisfaction with her and/or her party's policies. They are the 'golden voters' for any party in the run-up to any election because they're the people most likely to provide others with hard evidence of why the person should not be re-elected.
Plenty of folk make it a rule not to discuss politics over the dinner table. Others will discuss the runners and riders as election time approaches, swapping opinions on this or that party or individual. But verifiable testimony such as 'I wrote to my MP and it took 18 months for her to reply' is not 'opinion' - it's fact. And during a period when opinion, promises and rhetoric threaten to overwhelm, solid facts are seized upon.
We can only guess how many of Josie's fellow constituents will be opening their doors at some point during the next month to find Alison Thewliss standing there. It could be in the dozens, possibly the hundreds. But we do know for sure that she won't be climbing hundreds of flights of stairs in aid of charity - she'll be doing it because every one of those relatively 'active' constituents is crucial to her, not only for their own vote but those of their families, friends and neighbours.
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