Scottish elections- Rose Gentle

Less than 3 weeks to go now, and as before I'm highlighting the East Kilbride constituency where Rose Gentle will be standing as an independent anti-war candidate against Adam Ingram, the Nu-Lab armed force minister.



This further publicity for Rose Gentle is sparked by a request from FallujaForum to try to help raise the profile and power of her anti-war election campaign. Therefore, other bloggers might also join in linking to her website.

Her campaign has the merit of allowing people to vote, as Monbiot today recommends, for something they believe in, instead of the ethically uncomfortable choice for a tactical vote, as recommended by Tariq Ali recently. In this, Gentle's campaign has positive reasons to be supported, and not just the negative reason (important as this is) of a punishment vote against Nu-Lab. Nothing would please me better than Rose Gentle jumping up from the leather benches of the House of Commons, giein' it laldy to Nu-Lab.

Lots of bloggers, inc Scots to my surprise, are linking to http://www.whoshouldyouvotefor.com/ in order to take a quiz analysing your party identification for the upcoming elections. However, this tool only allows Tory, Nu-Lab, LibDem, Greens and UKIP as options. There's no option for nationalist (SNP, Plaid Cymru) or socialist (SSP, Respect) parties or, for that matter Reg Keys or Rose Gentle as anti-war candidates.

As previously remarked, the SSP has in the interest of collaboration stood down to allow Rose Gentle to stand unopposed against Adam Killgram. Reports at Socialist Worker and this week's Scottish Socialist Voice . It's now up to the SNP, closest contender for Killgram's seat, to take a similar constructive approach and allow *the* most important issue, The War, to take precedence in East Kilbride.



There are reasons to support Rose Gentle against Killgram whether you're distressed Labour, an anti-establishment Tory, an outraged nationalist, an SSP or a Green. And even if you're not a party political animal or a voter. The autonomous journalist Ewa Jasiewicz has been quoted at FallujaForum also supporting Rose Gentle. I take the liberty of reproducing/spell-correcting the statement here, since the link is not permanent.

Endorsement of the Rose Gentle campaign
By Ewa Jasiewicz

Rose Gentle reminds me of the tough-lipped and huge-hearted Palestinian mothers I met in Jenin and Nablus and all over the jailed land of Palestine. The heart bearing Gordon's face, black on gold, I have seen in plastic and real gold with a hundred Palestinian faces hung around the necks of mothers, brothers, sisters, fathers and best friends up and down Palestine. Martyrs, heroes, those who will live forever, those whose lives were claimed by staggering injustice. Rose's spirit is indominatable. She raised her family under gruelling circumstances, fighting the daily struggle fought all over Scotland, England, the world over by working class people trying to make ends meet, better the lives of their children, launch them into success, happiness, honesty and a healthy life lived much longer their own. Rose Gentle is an ideal peoples' representative. She has intimate experience of poverty, loss, injustice, the elements of the realities of working people's lives all over the country. Who better to relate to ordinary people and to understand the brutality, violence and manipulation of war than a mother who lost her son to a war for money, for capitalism. We need people like Rose Gentle to speak truth to power and fight against the interests of the few, the elite who play with our lives, both in the UK and Iraq, and force through their agenda on the backs of tanks, B52s, levelled homes and dead civilians and soldiers. We need people like Rose Gentle to stand up to that agenda, which values profit over people, greed over any good and which will hurl our planet into ecocide and 'endless war'. I can trust a woman like Rose Gentle, I can relate to a woman like Rose Gentle and I do and will stand by Rose Gentle when she runs against a man whose future allies are arms dealers and war criminals. As long as the theatre of politics plays on, better it be acted out by genuine, trustworthy, no-bullshit people who are capable of unmasking and undermining the farce and pathology of government. People like Rose Gentle who can echo our desires for change, an end to war and capitalism and a different kind of future based on justice and equality.

I'm an anarchist, I believe in human self-management on a local level based on co-operation and mutual aid without the government, without the state, this a reality practised all over the planet and it has been for thousands of years, but I'd play the game and vote for Rose Gentle, out of solidarity for her and the Justice for Gordon Gentle Campaign and all the lads and lassies out in Iraq craving home and dodging death, who need to come back. I'd also play the game and vote for Rose out of the need to kick the system-reproducing, war-stoking, ass-kissing, upper class Butt of Adam Ingram and all he and the political system he believes in and stands for. Yalla Get up and vote for Rose Gentle! For her, for Gordon, for the anti-war movement, to have one in the eye for the phoney career politicians and elitist power-hungry thieves who try to control us, and for some kind of glimmering, slim hope of change. She's yer woman.

( Ewa Jasiewicz is a British journalist, union activist and peace protestor who recently spent a year in occupied Iraq )