This is a tweet today from Allan Sutherland, a prominent No activist (he’s currently co-ordinating an attempt to unseat Ian Blackford in Ross, Skye and Lochaber via Unionist tactical voting) and regular fixture of the letters pages of all Scottish newspapers.
The tweet literally incites – indeed, implores – not one but two very serious criminal offences. (His Twitter account also includes such satirical gems as tweeting a video of the First Minister’s speech on Saturday with the voice of Adolf Hitler dubbed over it.)
The tweet comes days after a Scottish Labour candidate tweeted a meme depicting someone spraying bleach on SNP MP Joanna Cherry with the caption “BANG! and the terf is gone”, despite said candidate being supported by the Jo Cox Foundation – a charity set up after the Labour MP of that name was murdered with a gun.
Sutherland, who lives in Stonehaven, is for some reason hosting an anti-SNP meeting tonight in Maryhill in Glasgow, at which the Lib Dem candidate for Ian Blackford’s seat, Craig Harrow, will for some reason be speaking even though it’s 100 miles from the most southerly point of the Ross, Skye and Lochaber constituency.
We’ve received no response from Mr Harrow to our enquiry as to whether he supports calls for Nicola Sturgeon to be chloroformed and imprisoned (he follows us on Twitter, so we know he got the message), so we can only assume that he has no objections to backing an event hosted by someone espousing such views.
(The contents of Harrow’s own Twitter timeline – which contains a bizarre amount of retweets of Tory politicians rather than Lib Dems, along with various noted psychotic Unionist trolls, would appear to support that assumption.)
Mr Sutherland’s extraordinary and obsessive hatred of the First Minister – equating her to Hitler and calling for her to be assaulted and kidnapped – ought to be a matter of concern to Police Scotland. People are regularly arrested and charged for far less serious threats towards politicians than this.
So we hope someone will alert them and appropriate action will result to ensure Nicola Sturgeon’s safety at a time when she’s going to be in regular contact with the public on the campaign trail with little to no security. (The pic below is from this morning.)
Because even if Sutherland himself is just a harmless nutter intending no real danger (which we don’t know), any of his 563 unhinged followers might not be.
One Jo Cox is one too many. If we might very slightly paraphrase the famous US civil rights activist Maya Angelou: when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time, before it’s too late.
