Airdrie & Coatbridge Advertiser
MSP should face the facts over business interests
Alex Neil MSP clearly has too much time on his hands since Nicola Sturgeon booted him out of her cabinet.
What other explanation can there be for his ludicrously over-the-top attack on me in last week’s Advertiser?
Perhaps another reason Alex is so keen to attack me and concern himself with the Labour group is that his influence over the SNP group is clearly, like his political career, on the slide.
Last week he demanded that the SNP group at the council support a challenge to my leadership. They ignored him.
It must be hard for a man who has been used to wielding absolute power in the SNP in North Lanarkshire to find that councillors have a mind of their own.
Being attacked by Alex Neil is not exactly unusual for me but such is the level of nonsense he spouts that last week’s diatribe can’t go unchallenged.
So here are the facts behind his half-truths and nonsense.
Fact one: there is absolutely no secrecy surrounding our external auditor’s annual report.
The audit and governance panel, chaired by the leader of the SNP group, is a committee of the council. The report is freely available on the council’s website.
Fact two: the legal advice I received at the time was that I was not required to declare an interest in ECSA, a company set up by North Lanarkshire Leisure.
It’s not a legal requirement to declare an interest. It is a matter for an individual councillor.
I sought advice and followed that advice. This was not an outside interest.
I was a director of NLL and ECSA precisely because I am a councillor and I have never been paid for these roles.
Fact three: the issues raised surrounding the Time Capsule Trust, which no longer exists, were the subject of an audit report and dealt with in 2011.
If Alex wants to have a debate about transparency and serving the people of North Lanarkshire that’s fine by me.
Perhaps he might want to explain why he ignored the advice of an independent reporter and rode roughshod over the people of Mossend by personally overturning the council’s decision not to allow a massive expansion of a rail freight terminal?
Perhaps he might want to explain to the people of Plains why he didn’t, as the responsible minister, keep his promise and deliver a station for the village?
Perhaps he might want to explain his approval, in his short-lived and disastrous time as health minister, of the appointment of one of his cronies as a director of NHS Lanarkshire?
Meanwhile I’ll get on the with the job of making sure I do everything I can to protect the council from the appalling cuts foisted on us by his party and keep delivering outstanding services to the people of North Lanarkshire and thus avoid the reputation Alex has for over-promising and under-delivering.