ON the BBC’s Politics Live on Tuesday, SNP MP Stewart Hosie quoted a report that appeared in The Guardian about six months ago in which it was reported that the Labour Party had lost 91,000 members and was “in the red” to the tune of £4.8 million, before asking Labour MP Liz Kendall what went so wrong with its membership and why Sir Keir Starmer was so poor at managing the party’s finances and keeping members.

Ms Kendall declined to answer the questions and Jo Coburn, the sometimes highly interrogative host, did not pose a single follow-up question.

Mr Hosie then asked Tory MP Siobhan Baillie what the £3.5m noted by Open Democracy in the last year as “unaccounted for” in the 2019 election campaign by the Conservative Party had been spent on, but Ms Baillie also declined to answer and again Jo Coburn (who, when she was not interrupting him, was always prepared with a follow-up question for Mr Hosie) did not pose a single follow-up question.

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A spokesperson for the Electoral Commission said of the funds which were not accounted for: “The Commission reviewed the spending return delivered by the Conservative Party following the 2019 UK general parliamentary election, and is aware that not all required invoices were provided. Having reviewed the compliance of the return in the whole, we decided that it was not proportionate to take enforcement action in relation to those missing invoices.”

It seems evident from Mr Hosie’s unanswered questions that there are blatant double standards in the investigative reporting of UK political party memberships and finances, with the BBC seemingly playing a leading role in the huge disparity of media attention apparently driven by the SNP’s political opponents. This does not excuse any incorrect use of party donations but it raises significant questions as to why the same standards of supposedly impartial journalism, and public accountability, are not being applied to all political parties in the UK, and why the spending of several hundred thousand pounds of member donations not identified as assets is of seemingly more interest to authorities and reporters than tens of billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money lost to gross incompetence, corrupt processes and fraud.

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Was it simply coincidence that the arrest of the SNP CEO and the alarming police-intensive search of his house took place just after Humza Yousaf had been elected as First Minister? Was it simply coincidence that the arrest of the SNP treasurer took place on the morning when the new First Minister was scheduled to make a statement to the Scottish Parliament on his vision and the future policy agenda of his Scottish Government? While politics is not short of speculative conspiracy theories, the police actions around the spending of funds raised by the SNP for a new independence campaign could seemingly not have been better orchestrated to negatively impact on the SNP and its new leader Humza Yousaf, whom has had the focus on his new leadership and now the introduction of his policy agenda severely diverted with more than a little help from those in the mainstream media eager to assist the anti-SNP strategies of both the blue and the red Tories.

Stan Grodynski
Longniddry, East Lothian

I WAS disappointed to see the bottle return scheme has been delayed. As a volunteer litter collector on a half-mile rural road I was hoping to find less litter when the scheme went ahead. The vast majority of discarded litter is bottles and cans. Maybe the people who throw these items out of their cars are never going to recycle, but I live in hope.

Ann McGinnis
Girvan