Terrifyingly, I’ve been writing Scot Goes Pop for almost fifteen years (the anniversary is next month) and in that time there have been numerous occasions when I have criticised the SNP leadership for denying party members natural justice by suspending them when they had yet to be found guilty of any wrongdoing. The two worst injustices were the suspension of Michelle Thomson, which prevented her from defending her Westminster seat even though it later turned out she had done nothing wrong, and the suspension of Neale Hanvey, which would have prevented him standing in the 2019 general election if it had come a couple of weeks earlier. As it was, he was deprived of all official SNP support during the election, with the intention – grotesquely – of helping Labour hold the seat. Thankfully, the plan failed and Hanvey became an MP.
The reality is that pre-emptive suspension has got nothing to do with justice or fairness for the individual and everything to do with ruthless protection of the party at any cost. The idea is that the party will be insulated from any damage later on if the person they’ve suspended turns out to have done what they were suspected or accused of. But if the collective self-interest always trumps individual justice as far as the SNP are concerned, that principle should apply one hundred times over to Peter Murrell, who in the worst case scenario could do more damage to the party than all previous miscreants put together. And yet in this case, miraculously, the SNP find that they do care about natural justice and won’t suspend him because he’s not yet been found guilty of anything.
Such a blatant inconsistency can only mean one thing – that there is, after all, something more important than the interests of the party, namely the interests of the party’s ruling faction. Which of course shouldn’t be a surprise, because exactly the same imperative drove the seemingly irrational and self-destructive decision to install the unpopular Humza Yousaf as leader.
Humza is like a racing driver who says “we mustn’t lose our focus on winning the race!” even though he’s dismantled his racing car and booked a long weekend in Tuscany for the day of the race.
— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) April 11, 2023
The sequel to the “what have the Romans ever done for us?” joke:
“OK, *apart from* the membership numbers, the auditors resigning six months ago, and the arrest of Peter Murrell, what *is* this important information that SNP members supposedly didn’t have when they voted?”
— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) April 11, 2023
