Utter hypocrisy of SNP on second jobs

THERE is an argument that politicians should have outside interests, that the public are l ess well served by ‘professional politicians’ who have known nothing but the narrow world of Westminster or Holyrood than by old-school big beasts who drank deep from the cup of life.

But there is no case whatsoever for hypocrisy in politics and that brings us to the SNP, whose Westminster cohort is, as we report today, replete with MPs bringing in second incomes.

MP Pete Wishart first raised the issue, piously declaring that no Nationalist MP had a second job or even ‘a place on a company’.

Supporters say that was the position when he spoke before the 2015 General Election and that events later overtook his words.

But Mr Wishart went much further, setting out a position of moral superiority, placing his party above all others.

‘We owe it to our constituents to try to ensure that we do better,’ he said.

‘We are not part-time Members of Parliament. Looking after our constituents is a full-time job. A second job means a second master, and that second master expects something back in return.’

Almost a quarter of the new colleagues he was so keen to marshal in the SNP’s embarrassing scramble to occupy certain benches in the Commons seem to have the ‘second masters’ he mentioned.

Their interests range from property to business consultancy, marketing, TV and even haircutting.

So what is Mr Wishart’s position today? That his fine words of last February count for nothing, that his proclamation that Nationalist MPs have a higher calling is not something he now believes?

That would mark a spectacular U-turn and the public might well come to think him a man of few principles or substance, happy glibly to say one thing one day for party advantage and the opposite not long thereafter.

But regardless of the vacillating member for Perth and North Perthshire, the SNP rank-and-file have also had their say on whether they are happy for their MPs to bring in extra cash via second incomes.

As well as the Stalinist diktat that no Nationalist MP is allowed to criticise a group decision, the party standing orders demand MPs treat Westminster as ‘a fulltime commitment’.

In setting out such a stance, projecting themselves as the vanguard of a new style of politics where zealous Nationalists dedicate their every waking moment and every ounce of their being to the cause of separatism, the SNP has made a rod for its own back.

The party’s position is deeply hypocritical. It cannot hope to attract voters by declaring itself to be better than others when it too has feet of clay on this issue. Ill-informed SNP apparatchiks and radicals have called for MPs from other parties who have second incomes to be ‘outed’.

They fail to grasp that the issue is not about second jobs or second incomes.

It is about a party sanctimoniously lecturing others in a bid to fool the public and enacting rules which its own elected members then duplicitously disregard.