by Rab Bruce’s Spider

In the wake of the abhorrent Tory proposal to force Companies to publish lists of their non-UK workers, the Right Wing media have been desperate to find another stick with which to beat the SNP.

In the week of the SNP conference, most newspapers are going out of their way to publish articles which are critical of the Scottish Government, but the prize must surely go to the Daily Express who have launched a ferocious attack on the SNP for using a secret list of foreign nationals to write to EU citizens living in Scotland. The thrust of the story is that the NP are, at best, hypocrites for criticising the patriotic UK Government for quite rightly wanting to list foreign nationals while at the same time using their own secret list of names and addresses to allow them to identify EU citizens.

It sounds worrying, doesn’t it? Until you realise that the secret list in question is actually the Electoral Register. When you register to vote, you give your Name, Address, Date of Birth and Nationality. All political Parties are given access to the Electoral Register to allow them to contact their constituents. Identifying EU nationals is therefore pretty easy. How do you think the Electoral Commission knew how to exclude non-UK citizens from the Brexit Referendum?

Using the Electoral Register for this sort of purpose is a far cry from forcing Companies to publish details of their foreign employees solely in order to vilify them.

So the moral of the tale is, as usual, never to take media stories at face value.