YOU may recall that during the election campaign, I sent a Behind the Headlines newsletter about The National’s challenge to be included on Scottish Labour’s media list.

For years now it’s been an endless back-and-forth. One or two of the team will be added to their email list, and we’ll get a few invitations here and there. Then there will be radio silence. I challenged Anas Sarwar on this in person at the Press Awards, with other journalists present, and he seemed genuinely surprised and assured me he’d address the issue. Long story short, we ended up getting invitations and press releases in the last few weeks of the campaign.

But any progress we made seems to have been undone.

On Wednesday morning, I heard Sarwar was doing a press event in Glasgow. Weird, I didn’t get anything through about that. Neither did any of our reporters. This was right as we have several questions regarding the two-child cap vote, austerity, the Winter Fuel Payment, tax rises ...

I asked the team to check and check their inboxes again. It couldn’t be that we’d all been dropped after the election was over, could it? None of us got an invitation, and when I contacted the press team to get some answers ... more radio silence.

The National is a pro-independence daily paper. Of course there will be difficult questions for any Unionist party or politician. But the facts remain: There are many questions to be asked. Questions that our readers, and the people of Scotland as a whole, deserve answers to. For example, it’s still not clear how his party can be opposed to the two-child cap ... then vote to keep it. Or how Sarwar has any authority at all if the MPs just do what the Westminster whips say regardless of the agreed “Scottish Labour” position.

But Sarwar didn’t have to answer any questions like that last week. Because nobody from The National was given the opportunity to ask them.

We’ve sat through countless Green or SNP press events where journalists for explicitly pro-Union or pro-Conservative titles ask questions which are answered through gritted teeth, or even provoke booing from party members. But the point is that at least those parties are giving their critics a chance to engage. Scottish Labour won’t even give us that, and they’re starting to look a bit rattled.

What I’d like to see now is some solidarity from my journalistic colleagues in the wider media. They may not always agree with The National’s approach, and that’s fine. But once you accept our exclusion from the governing party’s media engagements, you’re accepting the limitation of democracy. And what happens when the next political party decides to exclude you? Who will stand up for your journalistic rights?

Trust us. We’re not giving up on this one easily.