When I showed up at Aberdeen University as a nervous first year student, coming from a place where traffic lights were only a theory, one of the first people I met was a Liberal SRC member called Dan Falchikov. He was really welcoming and friendly and always happy to help. He was very funny too and invaluable support as I made my first forays into student politics.
I lost touch with him over the years, although we ended up on the same Training for Trainers course about 12 years ago and I keep up with his news via his dad, Mike, who's a stalwart of the Scottish Lib Dems.
I discovered today that our Dan has been mentioned in various internetty dispatches and has been accused of fabricating a threat to Kingston Hospital. So, who are his accusers? Well, first of all we have a Daily Mirror journalist. That's the highly partisan Labour supporting Daily Mirror. Then we have Guido Fawkes and a Tory blogger, both of whom are not going to pass up the chance to stir things up for the Lib Dems, and then a couple of Labour websites. Hmmmm. So nobody neutral, then.
The fact that Labour are going to so much trouble to trash Dan makes me all the more certain that the Save Kingston Hospital Campaign is entirely justified.
Mary Reid has more on the background to the campaign and news on Freedom of Information requests made by local MPs Ed Davey and Susan Kramer. We'll see at the beginning of March what they reveal.
In the meantime, let me remind you of what happened one time before when the Liberal Democrats were accused of scaremongering about a hospital, in Hartlepool, during the by-election. Labour, including then PM Tony Blair, said emphatically that the hospital was safe. Really? Well, not so much.
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