THE SNP’s decision to suspend the membership of Dr Tim Rideout for his satirical comments highlighting Priti Patel’s double standards and heartlessness is lamentable.
Are they so literal-minded and fragilely fearful of criticism that they cannot see there is no racism in his turning of Patel’s own standards upon herself to illustrate what an awful person she is?
READ MORE: Police Scotland 'assessing' Dr Tim Rideout's Priti Patel tweet
It’s so irksome to see people on the left succumb to the hypocritical finger-pointing of right-wingers who never hold their own to these standards and who don’t believe in them in the first place. I’d prefer a much more robust defence of a fine man whose satirising of Cruela Patela is something almost every one of us who are not compassionless Tories agree with. I bet even Labour MP Ian Murray chuckled at the comment before trotting out his SNP-racism slur to score political points.
Is Tim Rideout to be thrown to the wolves in the same way as the gloriously funny and irreverent Janey Godley was? This is a stitch-up of a major pro-independence figure which some of us are in danger of being complicit in.
Dr David White
Galashiels
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