Mr S had not intended to provide a rolling blog of COP26. But with the UN’s green games less than a week ago, things in host city Glasgow go from bad to worse as the world’s leaders prepare to jet in to tell the rest of us how to save the planet. Unite and GMB today confirmed their bin men, school cleaners and janitorial staff will be the latest workers out on strike during the eco-summit, joining the RMT’s train drivers and the GBA’s lawyers on the picket lines. At what does point does industrial action become a general strike…?
And it’s that decision by the refuse collectors to walk out which will compound the other main issue currently plaguing Glasgow and its long-suffering residents. The head of the SNP-run authority Susan Aitken – the current frontrunner for Mr S’s ‘worst council leader in Britain’ – was hauled up before a House of Commons committee today amid increasing reports of the city’s infamous and ongoing rat infestation problem.
As Nicola Sturgeon delivered her big pre-COP26 speech this morning, at the Scottish Affairs Committee the leader of Glasgow City Council was trying to downplay bins staff being taken to hospital because of contact with rats. And for veteran Nat-watchers, the experience was the usual smorgasbord of deflection and dissemination; indeed Mr S has taken to calling Aitken ‘Kimberley’ given she produces more gems than a diamond mine. Under questioning from Douglas Ross, the hapless apparatchik resorted to stonewalling about reports of rubbish being piled high in the street, insisting that ‘all cities have rats’ as she was forced to admit:
There was I think one, possibly two, small incidents where an employee where there was a health and safety incident and they were taken as a precaution to hospital for a very minor contact with a rat. I have to say it is not unheard of. And it’s not been unheard of for decades that our cleansing employees occasionally come into contact with rats. It’s not something that is unique to Glasgow. It is something that is happening right across the UK. All cities have rats.
Subsequently Aitken responded with an emphatic ‘no’ when asked if she regretted her previous statements on Glasgow’s rat problems. These included, but are not limited to, claiming the city only needed a ‘wee spruce up’ or that SNP local government cuts were necessary so as to end ‘statism’ or for blaming ‘a wee ned with a spay can’ for Glasgow’s graffiti problems.
Still, at least Glasgow is leading the globe in one way. If international leaders next week want a textbook guide to world-class buck-passing, they only need look at the council leader in the host city where they’re staying.
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