‘English hater’ f it to f ight election for SNP

A NOTORIOUS independence activist who was linked to an anti-English terror campaign has been passed as fit to stand for the SNP.

Sonja Cameron, pictured, was a key figure in the sinister Settler Watch campaign that sought to intimidate English people who had moved to Scotland.

She was caught with a carload of anti-English posters in the 1990s – and inadvertently led the police to ‘tartan terrorist’ Andrew McIntosh, who owned the vehicle. Now 53 and living in Bridge of Allan, Stirlingshire, the German-born activist has survived the vetting process for SNP candidates wanting to stand for Stirling Council. She was approved despite a two-year suspension from the SNP and calls in the Commons for her to be expelled from the party.

Last night opposition parties said it beggared belief that she had been accepted as a potential candidate – while the SNP claimed she had reformed.

Meanwhile, veteran SNP councillor and former Stirling Council Lord Provost Fergus Wood said every party had its ‘oddballs’.

The SNP has faced consistent criticism over its vetting process. Earlier this week it emerged Allan Casey had been cleared to fight a council seat in Glasgow despite having previously posted his support for the IRA on Facebook.

Originally Sonja Vathjunker, she arrived in Scotland as a student in 1985 and soon changed her surname to Cameron, completing a PhD in Scottish history at Aberdeen University.

But, less than a decade after she herself moved to Scotland she embarked on a campaign to keep others out. In 1993 she was fined £80 for pasting anti-English posters on road signs in Banchory, Aberdeenshire. Police later found Cameron driving a Vauxhall Nova whose owner turned out to be Scottish National Liberation Army activist McIntosh – the culprit, later jailed, behind a series of hoax bombing campaigns.

Following suspension, her membership was renewed in 1996 and Mike Russell, the then chief executive of the party, declared the ‘slate is wiped clean’. An SNP spokesman said: ‘She deeply regrets what happened 23 years ago. Her behaviour back then is entirely at odds with the way she conducts herself today.’

But a Scottish Labour spokesman said: ‘It beggars belief that the SNP think this is a suitable candidate for a council election.’