Stirling Council and Trotsky's Elbow: Incompetence or Duplicity?

"This isn't the Gathering you're looking for - you can go about your business"

A few hours after this site went live on October 12th the news began to break that Stirling Council had pulled the plug on a large clan gathering for July 2014. Fortunately there were many other events as part of the homecoming schedule and a rescue package of sorts has come together from Event Scotland, the NTS and the Standing Council of Scottish Chiefs.

So far I've tried to hold back in really putting the boot into Stirling Council but its getting harder every day. Never mind the politics which are as plain as the nose on Barry Manilow's face. That one has been discussed to death. What really irks me is this:

Stirling Council set up a web page last year to promote 2014 events in Stirling, the web address if you don't already know iswww.stirling2014.co.uk. Ive not bothered making this a clickable link.. theres no point.. because if you do go there you get this message in a white screen.

WebEngine error: Page not found!

Now i've been involved in web design since the i was knee high to a dinosaur. And I can spot a hurriedly deleted web page when I see it. Quite simply someone logged into the web server, found the web pages and deleted them or renamed the files so they would not appear. This is the sort or rank unprofessionalism you would expect from some dodgy one man business running out of a spare room - not a local authority.

When challenged about this directly Stirling Council told me the pages were being 'updated'. This is a bare faced lie! for a start you don't just delete a site like this without having a holding page, also look at the first line of the error 'WebEngine', this is a content management system which means they don't even need a web designer to make the changes - anyone can do it! To still have a site in this state two and a half weeks later is utter nonsense!

So why is the site like this? well I have a disturbing theory...

Ever since Stirling announced the plans they have gone to great trouble to claim never existed in the first place the information has spread around the internet. folk have linked to the website from theirs. A virtual paper trail has spread all over the web and the trail ends in an abrupt full stop (WebEngine error: Page not found!). Ultimately a dead link on someones site looks like bad for them so this one act undermines so many other peoples work to bring the year of Homecoming to Scotland. It makes us all look like amateurs.

My concern is that not only are Stirling doing a 'sterling' job in undermining their own homecoming plans but they are doing a pretty good job firing spanners into anyone else's works while they are at it. And for what? fear of some nationalist rallying point on their patch? is this Labour/Conservative controlled council so afraid of the big bad 'Nats'? The longer this goes on the more it looks like it really might be the case.

If this was sport we would be talking about match fixing...

In their attempt to deny a gathering ever existed they have taken their own site down. The only reason for it being down so long is that they think that by having a dead page on the web for so long eventually Google etc will index it as just that and it will disappear from the web forever, in doing so every site that still links to it gets marked down for linking to a dead site. To me this is Tortious Interference.

In a way this reminds me of a story from the old Soviet Union; When Stalin came to power many people who had been considered 'heroes of the revolution' suddenly became 'persona non grata'. Stalin's people poured over early photographs of him and carefully touched out anyone who was now out of favour - this included Trotsky himself, The original photos were destroyed and the doctored ones put in circulation. It was only around 20 years ago that a photographer looking at a line up of leaders saw something poking out from behind Stalin that shouldn't be there, it was an elbow, an elbow with no body, or head! After years of research the photographer unearthed the original image to discover that the elbow belonged to Trotsky, who had been removed from the revised photo.

In attempting to airbrush out The Gathering, Stirling Council have left an elbow in the picture - an elbow with a message:

WebEngine error: Page not found!