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this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2024
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Sounds a bit like a cosy club if you can just bar people at will, regardless of whether the public wishes someone to be their MSP or not.
This is the kind of law that sounds reasonable until you hear cases of people being put on the sex offenders register for having a piss near a playground at 3am on their way home from the pub. Or in the future, if we have a hostile parliament to the people and there's a backlash, anyone who stood up could potentially be barred based on their activism.
Scotland is a pretty well run and reasonable country when it comes to laws and courts but that doesn't mean there isn't and won't be abuses of the law now or in the future and laws like this can be abused to ensure only the "right people" get to decide our laws.
I also notice the article focuses heavily on Stephen Flynn with no mention of Douglas Ross at all, wtf?
Yes, marking their own homework with the offences being a bit wooly there. It should probably fall to an external org about suitability of MSPs. Parties are clearly failing at this though, and vetting all candidates isn't a simple task either. I expect the committee stage may well see that part either removed or tightened to a limited set of offences. And Scottish press think we are all idiots and so don't mention unionists, or historical examples at it
Has anybody ever actually been put on the register under those circumstances though? It sounds apocryphal
In Scotland? I don't think so. In the world, ever? Certainly, there's examples from America, which means it's not impossible to become a thing here at some point.
My worry is more about the point of barring certain people from being able to hold office rather than the specifics of why they're being barred.
If somebody is on the sex offenders list, in a proportionally representative democracy, with a healthy fourth estate, I would hope that would be requirement enough to prevent them from becoming an MSP. If they still managed to get elected, I would hope it's because they managed to prove their reason for being on the list was spurious. It erodes trust in fair and free elections the bigger the list becomes of who can not set the rules.
I know it's a slippery slope argument, but after years of reading other countries' news, it feels a legitimate worry to have. Governments come and go, just because we have a good one now doesn't mean we will in the future. Laws like this could be abused to prevent "undesirables" from holding office.