SNP MP warns of authoritarian slippery slope after Palestine Action vo
The SNP and the LibDems abstained, while 87 Tories and 275 Labour MPs supported the effort.
READ MORE: MPs' 'hypocrisy' blasted as Suffragettes celebrated while Palestine Action banned
Questions had been raised as to why the SNP abstained, to which MP Brendan O'Hara responded to in an opinion piece for The National.
He said that the SNP did not want to be seen to vote against proscribing other the three other groups in the vote: the "Maniacs Murder Cult", a Moldovan neo-Nazi group, the Russian Imperial Movement – a far-right group aiming to rebuild the Russian Empire – and its paramilitary wing the Russian Imperial Legion.
He wrote: "Despite being asked, the UK government, in a disgraceful, cynical, manipulation of parliamentary procedure, refused to separate these groups and allow MPs to make individual decisions on whether each of them met the threshold for proscription – forcing an all or nothing vote.
"And that decision to lump all three groups together in the way that they did should lead any reasonable person to conclude that this was a grubby political decision to proscribe a group that the government simply don't like, and not what the government claim was an issue of vital national security."
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