Dirty work at the crossroads?

See democracy? It can be a damn nuisance sometimes. The Evening News reports that the SNP is getting a little jumpy:

"MORE than 200 Scottish National Party members in the Lothians have been barred from voting in the selection of list candidates for next year's Holyrood elections by party chiefs.
SNP officials said there had been an unusually big surge in membership in the Lothians in the first three months of the year. And although no allegations of wrongdoing had been made, the party's National Executive Committee (NEC) decided all new recruits in the area should be excluded from the selection ballot. But today some of the 259 members affected said they felt their honesty was being called into question.
And insiders claimed the move was targeted at retired GP Ian McKee, the party's candidate in Edinburgh Pentlands, who is challenging sitting MSPs Kenny MacAskill and Fiona Hyslop for a top place on the Lothian list. It is understood more than 200 new members were recruited in the Pentlands constituency.
The NEC ruled that while everywhere else in Scotland members will be able to take part in the selection if they joined before March 31, in Lothian they can only vote if they signed up before December 31."

The last sentence of the above is important. How can the party apply different rules in Lothian than elsewhere? I suspect that we may hear more about this...