After the brave new world rhetoric and the endless claims about social justice from the SNP, I’m unclear how any of the Party’s new membership intake can be encouraged by the treatment of prospective SNP parliamentary candidate and former UK ambassador, Craig Murray. Read here for Murray’s reasoned and eloquent account of his treatment by the SNP hierarchy.

Any supposed social democratic party that would prioritise party loyalty over the right of one of its MPs to vote against the Conservative bedroom tax is certainly not democratic nor is it advancing social justice. Then again, this is the same SNP that voted to bring down the Labour government in 1979, thereby ushering in Margaret Thatcher and 18 years of Tory government, so perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. Like many other parties with radical and revolutionary ideas throughout history, the SNP’s rhetorical and ideological attachments to social welfare and social justice are negated by its unmistakably autocratic tendencies.

Image courtesy of Vodex