Why won’t the SNP discipline Paul Monaghan over offensive tweets?

Paul Monaghan, the SNP MP for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross, seems quite keen to become Parliament’s new David Ward by making offensive comments on Twitter. The Jewish Chronicle earlier this week extracted an apology from the MP for tweeting about the ‘proud Jewish race’ who were ‘persecuting the people of Gaza’ – but he’s also tweeted about the Union Flag being a ‘butcher’s apron’ and the ‘queen’s diarrhoea’.

Given Emily Thornberry (unfairly, in my view) lost her Labour frontbench job for tweeting a picture of a house with the innocuous comment ‘Image from #Rochester’, Monaghan has had a relatively relaxing experience since these tweets have come to light, simply having to apologise with no formal disciplinary procedures announced. His party has said:

‘The tweets highlighted are dated and he accepts the language and sentiments used are not what he would adopt now.’

The reason Monaghan isn’t in more trouble is that he was sending these messages at least a year before he was elected as an MP – though at the very least it is odd that the party didn’t comb through his twitter feed before selecting him as a candidate in January 2015.