It seems to be all going to pot for the SNP. The party’s chief executive and its top spinner are heading for the exit as the ongoing shambles of a leadership race continues to claim more scalps than a Scorsese flick. And it seems the pressure is getting to some of the SNP’s grandees, judging by their touchy attitude towards the reinvigorated Scottish press.
Today it was the turn of Alison Thewliss, the party’s Home Affairs spokesman at Westminster, who threw a very public fit on Twitter after having her regular column spiked in the Daily Record last week. ‘I had never been told what to write until this weekend,’ she declared. ‘I wrote a piece on the Asylum Ban Bill, because it is topical and important. I’ve been binned’. Poor lamb.
Thewliss accompanied her tweet with a screenshot from the paper’s political editor Paul Hutcheon asking, not unreasonably, for her to write about the ongoing SNP contest as it ‘seems like the biggest issue just now.’ After Thewliss declined to do so, her column was not published, with Hutcheon writing that ‘readers would have wanted to know your thoughts’ and ‘it would have looked odd to have run a piece that ignored the controversies.’
He concluded that changes to the columnists’ section meant her column would no longer be required, with Hutcheon thanking the SNP MP for her past efforts. Thewliss’s response was to retort ‘if you’re going to tell me what to write, it’s not my column’ – ignoring, er, the editing part of his title – and then to share the screenshots of their conversation online (presumably without Hutcheon’s consent). She concluded by posting:
But if you’re offering me space to give my views on the most important issue today, it’s the cruel Asylum Ban Bill, which rips up protections for the most vulnerable. Maybe no one read the column, maybe my writing sucks, but cancelling me when I don’t write what I’m told? Nope.
Cue much hue and cry from outraged SNP apparatchiks. Still, Mr S can’t help but recall that no such fury accompanied a similar incident last January when Tory MP Julie Marson had her local paper column spiked because she refused to write about the Downing Street parties. Funny that.
The paper’s decision to axe Thewliss’s column is moreover hardly a surprise. Having falsely denied a legitimate story from the Sunday Mail (on the SNP’s loss of 30,000 members) the party are going to now have to face a much tougher time from the rest of the Record stable. At last…
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