Scotland’s worst council leader strikes again

Susan Aitken, the worst thing to hit Glasgow since the Luftwaffe, might well be Britain’s most hapless council leader. The SNP leader of Glasgow City Council was challenged again on the city’s cleaning crisis during a BBC interview last night. Shown footage of graffiti at the Scottish Event Campus, soon to host the COP26 conference, Aitken blamed ‘a wee ned with a spray can’. It is not Aitken’s first gaffe over a city-wide waste and dumping epidemic. In a knuckle-gnawingly awkward TV grilling earlier this month, she insisted Glasgow’s streets weren’t ‘filthy’ and just needed ‘a spruce up’.

Last month, Sir Keir Starmer visited and met with campaigners from the GMB union, which has been at the forefront of efforts to get the council to clean up the city. Sir Keir opined that the situation showed ‘a failure of leadership from the SNP council’, prompting Aitken to retort that he was ‘on pretty shaky ground as a London MP, coming up and telling Glasgow that we’re filthy’.