Britain’s worst council leader given gong

For months now, Mr S has chronicled the tribulations of Susan Aitken, who is the first SNP leader of Glasgow City Council and appears determined to be the last, too. She has presided over a waste crisis in which refuse-strewn streets have become a familiar sight even in the city’s leafier suburbs and which threatened to embarrass locals on the world stage ahead of COP26. 

Challenged on this, Aitken insisted Glasgow needed only ‘a spruce up’. When that didn’t work, she trained her fire on her critics, detecting in the concerns of the GMB union ‘a real echo of the language that some far-right organisations have used’ and telling Sir Keir Starmer he was ‘on pretty shaky ground as a London MP, coming up and telling Glasgow that we’re filthy’. Thereafter, she went on to blame the waste row on everyone from ‘a wee ned [non-educated delinquent] with a spray can’ to Margaret