Oh dear. It never takes long for the perpetually-warring SNP to take a pop at someone — but now the party’s leaders are, er, squabbling among themselves. The cause this time? Whether or not the nationalists should boycott Westminster, following Gazagate last month. At least we’d be spared Ian Blackford’s bloviating…
Keith Brown, the party’s deputy leader, yesterday took to the pages of that august journal, the Sunday National, to attack Labour for being ‘unrepentant about the illegitimate thwarting of the SNP’s Opposition Day debate’. He then suggested that the issue of withdrawing SNP MPs from Westminster ought to ‘be re-examined’, arguing:
An incompetent Speaker and a contemptuous Knight of the Realm have ensured that many people in Scotland will no longer regard Westminster as democratic and certainly not as theirs. Why should we collude in that contempt?
Brown’s views are shared by others. Douglas Chapman, former treasurer and outgoing MP, told Alex Salmond’s Scotland Speaks show last year that if the UK government does not grant Holyrood another referendum then the SNP should withdraw from Westminster: ‘Everybody in the Yes movement knows that we’ve had mandate after mandate without any real change.
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