THE editor of a student newspaper slammed for a "misogynistic" article about Nicola Sturgeon and Scottish independence has doubled down.
Linden Grigg offered a staunch defence of a controversial piece that appeared in his paper The Saint last week.
The article, entitled Och Aye The Noo and Au Revoir, was slammed for its “misogynistic and xenophobic” content and led to Grigg and his team being branded “pathetic wee trolls” by Tricia Marwick, the former Presiding Officer of the Scottish Parliament.
In a stream of tweets, Grigg said the article – which compared Scotland to a menopausal woman – was a “satirical representation of the views that the average voter might hold”.
“We believe the piece is funny, and that anyone who cannot see, at the very least, the attempt at humour (whether successful or not), is either tone-deaf, or willfully treating the piece as a serious contribution to the independence debate,” he added.
“We find it much harder not to find sinister intent within the actions of the second group. These actions seem to amount to what I would call intimidation.”
Accusations of misogyny were dismissed with Grigg saying the First Minister “is not scary because she is a woman with power - she is scary because of the way she uses that power”.
Sturgeon has “created a cult around herself to obscure the SNP's awful record” and said The Saint had been criticised by the First Minister’s “hero-worshippers”.
Grigg also appeared to confuse Marwick for a working politician, claiming she “took time out from supposedly running Scotland to comment on a comedic article we published in our tiny paper”. She retired from politics in 2016.
He also thanked the arch-Unionist blog The Majority for taking up the paper’s cause.
We told previously how the article likened a “menopausal” Scotland and England to a “middle-aged couple living in the suburbs” with Wales as the “family dog”.
Its author said devolution had the countries in “separate bedrooms since 1997”.
Scotland had been turned into the “ultimate Braveheart tribute act (sponsored by Heineken 0.0, naturally)” by Nicola Sturgeon. The article further said the First Minister had made “hell a place on Earth”.
Other jokes were made about the rate of drug-related deaths in Glasgow and Scotland’s “deep fried gloom”.
Stefan Hoggan-Radu, an SNP council candidate for Fife, called the article “disgusting and misogynistic” and called on the university to take action.
The Saint is editorially and financially independent of St Andrews University, the institution has confirmed to The National.
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