Yes, there are rats... but it’s Maggie’s fault
SUSAN Aitken was up for questioning before the Scottish Affairs Committee in Glasgow and her specialist subject was The Blunders of Susan Aitken, 2017-present. She has insider knowledge, of course, but it’s still a vast field of study.
The one upside to her appearance is that it got her out of the council chambers, so at least the city was safe for half an hour.
The leader of Scotland’s largest municipality had been called in to tell MPs if Glasgow was prepared for Cop26 delegates. A more pressing question is whether delegates are prepared for Glasgow.
Tory MP John Lamont was visiting the city for the committee and had decided to walk around snapping pictures on his phone of all the rubbish he could find. His Instagram must be a riot.
‘Do you have any sense of embarrassment that the world is going to be looking at Glasgow and Scotland and this is the condition of Glasgow city?’ he asked.
‘I am never embarrassed by Glasgow,’ Aitken intoned.
‘Not embarrassed by Glasgow: do you feel any sense of embarrassment personally that you’ve allowed the city to fall into this state of disrepair?’ ‘I think that’s entirely gratuitous.’ Douglas Ross, so bitchy he clearly missed his true calling as a Loose Women panelist, seized on Aitken’s introductory remarks.
He snarked: ‘You mentioned that Glasgow is ready for Cop26 bar some “technical issues”. Is it “technical issues” that the bins are overflowing, there’s rats in the streets and some of your employees have been taken to hospital while they’ve been collecting that rubbish? Are those the “technical issues” you mean?’
‘No,’ she shot back, ‘and again I would say that is completely gratuitous.’ ‘But that is happening, isn’t it?’ ‘No.’ Lordy. There’s a fine line between sticking to your talking points and sounding like you just stepped off the mothership from Mars.
The Scottish Tory leader pressed on: ‘So your employees haven’t been taken to hospital while they’ve been collecting rubbish? There are no bins overflowing? There are no rats on the streets of Glasgow?’
‘There was one… possibly two… at most… small incidents where there was… a health and safety incident.’
These cases, she added, involved only ‘very minor contact with a rat’. Very minor contact with a rat is having written a fan letter to Roland back in the day.
Growing impatient with Ross’s line of questioning, she told him matter-of-factly: ‘All cities have rats.’
THE council’s PR chief Colin Edgar sat beside his boss and looked to be pondering whether or not the impending incineration of the planet was such a bad thing after all. Then, she scolded Ross about Glasgow’s ‘historic challenges’, which were ‘a legacy of our post-industrial past, when the Thatcher government walked away and left in neglect communities right across this city’.
Somehow the Iron Lady, who left office when Aitken was a teenager, was to blame. On the contrary, if it was up to Maggie, the bin lorries would be privatised, Kim and Aggie brought in as strike-breakers and the rats forced to pay poll tax.