What Westminster needs now is a big round of applauseWhen a corrupt Speaker is in place, when that Speaker is in the pocket of the leader of one particular party, and when there aren't currently the numbers to dislodge that Speaker, there's a limit to what the SNP can do to fight back against their rights being trampled on. But that doesn't mean they can do nothing. Opposition parties have run campaigns of constructive parliamentary non-cooperation in the past, sometimes quite effectively. I recall Labour did it for a few months under John Smith in around 1993 or 1994.
You'd need to have better knowledge of the arcane list of Westminster rules and conventions than I have to know what is possible and where the vulnerabilities of the system lie, but to give one trivial example, the SNP should refuse to use "Hear, hear" as the indication of agreement with what another member is saying, and just use clapping instead. They clearly did that the other day as an intentional form of low-grade resistance to Hoyle (ie. to wind him up) but they should make it a universal practice from now on. Hoyle will go nuts every time it happens, and that would be the whole aim of the exercise. There's nothing realistically he can do about it - he can't suspend the entire SNP parliamentary party on a daily basis. In a sense he'd be doing the SNP's work for them by constantly causing his own parliamentary disruption with pointless, pompous lectures on the subject. And I'm not sure the SNP would get the blame for it, because the public would just be bemused that the Speaker is so obsessed with forcing MPs to use weird grunting noises rather than clapping like normal people do.
Source: What Westminster needs now is a big round of applause (//)