If you’ll excuse me I’m going to take a moment to do something I’ve never done before and defend the SNP…or at least one of them.

This morning, during a conversation about the EU referendum, Mhairi Hunter – an SNP councillor for Glasgow – tweeted this…

In light of the SNP’s claim that the 2014 Scottish referendum would be a “once in a generation” event and their talk of a possible second referendum, aimed at keeping Scotland in the EU when the UK Brexits, the responses were predictable.

And Twitter’s nothing if not predictable.

From what I’ve seen – and I’ve seen a lot, thanks to being mentioned in the tweet – most of the responses miss the point.

The independence of Scotland is absolutely central to the SNP, if you removed that the party that was left would not be the SNP.

It’s also a view that many people in Scotland hold; 1.6m people voted for independence in September 2014 and there’s no evidence of that level of support dropping.  Those 1.6m people absolutely have a right to a political party which not only recognises and supports their view, but campaigns in the light of game-changing events – such as the Brexit vote – to have the electorate’s position on that view reassessed.

That isn’t a hypocritical position, that’s staying loyal to your party’s vision.

Finally, although I disagree with at lot of things that Mhairi tweets I have always found her to be intelligent, articulate and willing to debate issues…and if you’re wasting opportunity that Twitter affords to engage with intelligent people who have differing views to simply name-call and score points then you’re making the Twitter experience worse for all of us.