Well we must admit we didn't see that one coming.
Source - Wings over Scotland - 12/10/23
Although maybe it’s just because over the last few years the concept of an SNP MP having any sort of principles has become so wildly implausible.
There’s no doubt that Lisa Cameron’s card was already marked within the party. She was about to be deselected and replaced with this oily chancer (the one on the right, not the lovechild of Frankie Boyle and Kevin Bridges):
Grant Costello is yet another from the SNP’s neverending production line of ambitious woman-hating young gay men who’ve never had any kind of job or life outside politics, having previously been the chair of the sexual-abuse-and-bullying-infested Scottish Youth Parliament. Remarkably, he’d already been publicly backed by a number of SNP politicians to oust Cameron as the candidate next year.
Cameron, meanwhile, had been ostracised in the SNP chiefly for raising concerns about sex pest Patrick Grady, and as a result the party had made her life an absolute misery. Her statement said:
“I do not feel able to continue in what I have experienced as a toxic and bullying SNP Westminster group, which resulted in my requiring counselling for a period of 12 months in Parliament and caused significant deterioration in my health and wellbeing.
“I will never regret my actions in standing up for a victim of abuse at the hands of an SNP MP last year, but I have no faith remaining in a party whose leadership supported the perpetrator’s interests over that of the victims and who have shown little to no interest in acknowledging or addressing the impact.”
So being replaced by Costello would have been an intolerable irony.
Contrary to a report in The National, Dr Cameron told Wings this morning that she had NOT “had a significant change of heart about independence”, but that like many other people – including this site – she would have grave misgivings about it being achieved under the current SNP leadership.
(And frankly, independence is no more or less likely with Lisa Cameron in the Tories than it was with her in the SNP, because neither of those parties wants it to happen.)
Cameron can expect a torrent of abuse in the coming days, and wisely appears to have already deleted her Twitter account. The move is surprising in that it gives the SNP an obvious get-out: the party’s base will turn viciously on an apostate, and it’s certainly unlikely to trigger a flood of other unhappy M/SPs following in her wake.
(But time is running out for those people anyway. They’re going down with the ship.)
What it certainly isn’t is a career move. Cameron told Wings that she won’t be running again next year, and a Tory ticket in East Kilbride (rock-solid Labour until the 2015 tsunami) would be unlikely to be a winner anyway. In contrast to Costello, she has professional skills and experience in other fields and should have no trouble finding work outside of politics.
(Although if we were the Tories we’d probably make her a peer next year for lolz.)
In the meantime she told us she plans to use her time in Parliament being a voice for abuse victims and the disabled, which is a more honourable pursuit than most, and that she intends to work constructively with anyone towards those goals and on “staying in touch with people I respect, which isn’t anyone in the SNP”.
And while SNP loyalists will doubtless scream that she should stand down and trigger a by-election, we doubt that Humza Yousaf would be so keen – his skint, divided and dysfunctional party needs neither the cost nor the humiliation so soon after Rutherglen.
Cameron crossing the floor will certainly send a shockwave through Scottish politics, and there remain some unanswered questions about why she’d choose to join the Tories, whose record on disability issues is dubious at the very best. But perhaps the real question we should all be asking is why it took quite so long for someone in the SNP to find the courage to willingly jump off the gravy bus.
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