By delaying its online pretend “conference” until the end of November, the party has ensured that the chronically dysfunctional current National Executive Committee (NEC) controls the selection of candidates for next year’s election, and it’s using that power every bit as crookedly as anyone who’s been paying attention recently might fear.

Cllr CarolineMcAllister, Joanna Cherry QC., and First Minister NicolaSturgeon.

Following the stitch-up of Joanna Cherry, the latest victim of the SNP’s woke cabal is Caroline McAllister, a woman who the party considers quite fit to be a councillor – and indeed the Deputy Leader of its group on West Dunbartonshire council – but who has suddenly somehow become unacceptable when she tried to seek nomination for the MSP seat currently held by Jackie Baillie, pictured left, of Scottish Labour.

She is, of course, far from alone.

Party insiders like the former Trade And Industry spokesman Iain Lawson [Lawson was a leading figure in the Conservative Party in Dumbarton where his father, the Rev Alexander Lawson, was minister at St Andrew’s Parish Church in Bellsmyre] have been shining light on the arcane and opaque processes of “vetting”, whereby people who want to be candidates themselves astonishingly have the power to block potential rivals and where “woke” candidates are receiving extremely preferential treatment, but the fait accompli is almost complete – by the time the party belatedly elects a new NEC in six weeks, candidates will be in place and it’ll be too late to change anything.

[Meanwhile, a lot of people are questioning why McAllister is okay to be an SNP councillor as well as deputy leader if not good enough to be an MSP, but of course their majority on West Dunbartonshire Council would disappear if she were banned from that. Editor, Democrat]

And, of course, what’s revealing is who HAS been passed to stand for nomination as well as who hasn’t. Readers, meet a man called Mridul.

Nicola Sturgeon giving her support to Mridhul Wadhwa.

The person in the picture above with Nicola Sturgeon is both biologically and legally male – he has no Gender Recognition Certificate. His name is Mridul Wadhwa (Mridul is a male name in India, where he’s from) and he’s the manager of Forth Valley Rape Crisis, a job he obtained by concealing the fact that he was a man – something he appeared to enjoy bragging about before suddenly deleting his tweets on the subject.

The person posing the questions in that exchange has of course subsequently been banned from Twitter, as gender-critical feminists who pose awkward questions for trans activists invariably are. Incidentally, Wadhwa’s “14 years” claim above appears to be a blatant lie – according to his own LinkedIn page he’s only worked in Rape Crisis since 2014, which is six years, and at Forth Valley for two.

He’s also lying when he says that “no one asked”. The application form for the job can still be found on the organisation’s website and it clearly asks if the applicant considers themselves to be a trans person.

In this 2019 video, which hasn’t been deleted yet, Wadhwa makes it very plain that his deception was deliberate and premeditated, saying “It was pretty clear to me that I was the only transwoman in the women’s aid movement [laughs], and I wasn’t even sure whether I would have been hired if they had known that I was trans”.

It’s even odder given Wadhwa’s own stated views on whether males should hold such positions, such as this astounding quote he gave to a student newspaper last year.

Wadhwa also doesn’t believe that self-ID of the sort he’s adopted for himself would ever be abused, despite the literally hundreds and hundreds of documented examples of it being abused by men in order to gain access to women and assault them.

Now, you might be forgiven for thinking that a man getting a job in a rape crisis centre by pretending to be a woman was behaviour that would set off every alarm and red flag on the face of the planet, but it doesn’t seem to bother the SNP.

(Although persistent but unverified rumours abound within the party rank-and-file that Wadhwa was just a step too far even for the NEC and he actually DID fail vetting, only for the decision to be overruled by a senior Cabinet minister whose name we won’t reveal as the story is unconfirmed. But if it’s true – and our sources are good ones – it would be perhaps the most revealing thing of all about the SNP’s current direction.)

Wadhwa has in fact been approved to stand for nomination in TWO seats – Edinburgh Central (ironically the seat Joanna Cherry was effectively barred from contesting, and whose nomination will surely go to either Angus Robertson or Marco Biagi, who has strong Dumbarton and Helensburgh connections – his late father, Tony, owned fish and chip restaurants in both towns]) and more pertinently Stirling, the centre of the party’s woke faction.

Seven people are understood to be in the running for the Stirling nomination (including, we note without comment, NEC member Ellen Forson, who would have had a vote on whether Wadhwa passed vetting), and there’s no obvious high-profile front runner, so the outcome is hard to predict. Given the electorate, it’s entirely possible that Wadhwa could secure the nomination.

This is despite the fact that because a male incumbent is standing down, under SNP policy Stirling is meant to be a woman-only shortlist. The other six contenders, unlike Wadhwa, are all female.

We gather that a complaint has been filed through solicitors, but experience shows that the SNPs rules are only ever applied to the non-woke. So experienced, talented and principled female candidates like Joanna Cherry and Caroline McAllister are out, while dodgy blokes with an unexplained desire to deceive their way in plain view into the presence of the most vulnerable women in the country get waved through and invited to shape Scotland’s legislation for the next five years.

The only remaining obstacle to the woke coup is the party membership, who ultimately get to decide who they choose to stand as their candidates. It’s the only part of the process that the leadership and the NEC don’t completely control.

Anyone who wants independence can only hope they know what they’re doing and who they’re being asked to hand control of the movement to for the next five years.

• The Dumbarton Democrat, has been banned for a long period of months by the SNP-controlled council and the local party in West Dunbartonshire, has been banned and boycotted by them for asking questions they don’t like. The SNP’s two MPs at Westminister, Martin Docherty Hughes and Brendan O’Hara, who represents the Helensburgh and Lomond area, supports the ban. Others, such as Andrew Muir, a Dumbarton Independent, who is anti-abortion and Pro Life, have been thrown out of the SNP. Editor