@ ronnie anderson
No. Bay rok does not remind me of Duggie.Duggie is undoubtedly a troll. Bay rok seems to me to be a loyal person upset on behalf of a friend. Can't fault that.
Nor do I think that it is reasonable to criticise someone who actively campaigns on an issue, for taking the opportunity to inform policy in a mainstream political party. Indeed that is something I would like to see more of, and I hope it will be more usual in a post independence Scotland. I want more people to be involved in politics because I think that is good for democracy.
Having said that, the problem here is that the statements she is making are at odds with the facts. It wouldn't matter who was saying them, they would still be at odds with the facts.
The woman is lying about those facts, or she has been misled, or she has made a mistake of monumental proportions all by herself. I don't know which.
It matters that she is promoting this false information because the hope is that she will have greater influence because she has a disabled child and is therefore presumed to know something about the issue. This is essentially a peculiar version of the "appeal to authority" argument and it is fallacious. Very often those who are most involved in particular issues know least about how things work at the political/administrative level. That is understandable because they are busy and they deal with the day to day outcomes mostly. There is not much help for people if they wish to make a wider analysis so it takes time, effort and a certain amount of expertise to find out how things actually work. That is amply demonstrated by this very article: Mr Campbell is very good at digging out information and he obviously has library skills that I, for one, lack: and that is not because I don't try. Despite the internet it is still very difficult to quickly access real and trustworthy information for yourself.
I think it is always a mistake to focus on the individual. The statement she has made, if correctly reported, is false by implicature.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/implicature/This is something we should watch out for, in assessing what we are told. She does not say the NHS is uk wide: but she implies it and many will fill in the gap just as intended, because we are cooperative conversationalists. She does not say that the treatment her daughter received will not be available in an independent Scotland: but she implies it. And so on.
Abuse of our conventional rules in conversation is very common in politics: this is another example and this is the issue. Not who she is, nor what her motivation is, but what her rhetoric does through an illegitimate use of implicature.
