Statement from Tom Minogue

Thank you to the 374 Fifers who saw through the spin and voted for Tom Minogue, who issued this statement:-

"The first thing I would like to place on record now that the people of Dunfermline and West Fife have spoken, is my congratulations to Willie Rennie on being elected member of Parliament for the Dunfermline and West Fife constituency.

It is heartening to see that Labour have been found out in Fife and their supposed Fiefdom is now exposed as a myth.

As for our own party I consider that taking all things into account we have acquitted ourselves well to poll 374 votes, we finished in front of one UK party (UKIP) and were not too far behind the Scottish Socialist Party candidate John McAllion who in anyone's view is one of the most experienced and respected politicians in Scotland.

To achieve over 1% of the vote might not seem much but we polled 12% of what the Conservative candidate polled and this is no mean achievement when one considers that today marks the second week in existence for the Abolish Forth Bridge Tolls Party-compare this with our opponents in the major parties who count their age in hundreds of years-we have had to learn the ropes in a short space of time. We cannot complain about that as we knew this when we in NAAT Scotland decided to stand.

What we did not know was that the National Media in the form of TV, Radio, and the Press would give us and the other four other "minor" candidates virtually no platform on which to get our message across. I took this up with Michael Crick on BBC Newsnight and he said that they (the media) had to make a judgement on which parties were most likely to win. I suppose the extension to this argument is that in the next election the BBC may only interview who they reckon will be the winner during the campaign. This is sad and does not reflect well on our so called enlightened democracy. I must, though, thank the local and regional newspapers for giving us some opportunity to get our message across.

At the risk of appearing churlish I would also take this opportunity of criticising in the strongest possible terms the Labour Government for calling this election only a matter of days after the death of the previous MP. Apart from showing little respect for their dead colleague this move gave a massive advantage to the major parties whose party machines are geared to spring into action, and most of all to their own party-but the fast track election made it hard for the small parties and harder still for us who had to first set-up a party to contest the election. However now that we are set-up and have some experience of how an election works be sure that this experience will not be wasted-we will contest the next election in this constituency on the same manifesto of abolishing tolls and other local issues. We shall return.

But now our first priority is to lobby MSP's to put pressure on the Scottish Executive not to extend the Tolling Order which as part of the 1958 Act allows a bridge joint board to collect tolls after the period by which they should have expired.

Finally I would like to thank the returning officer and his staff for their assistance and guidance and of course all who have taken part in this hasty election, but in most cases these officials and staff are paid for their efforts. So most of my praise must go to my own supporters who have sacrificed their leisure time and worked tirelessly to compress a month's work into a two week period. To me, they were the real winners in this election."

No Tolls