Another week, another car-crash of an interview for Glasgow’s SNP Council Leader Susan Aitken.

Only weeks after refusing to accept the waste crisis she is overseeing on our streets after being challenged by STV’s Bernard Ponsonby, Councillor Aitken has yet again proved just how out of touch with reality she is.

Speaking to the BBC last week she continued her long running assertion that the environmental catastrophe she has imposed on this city represents a challenge not unique to Glasgow. There is no other city in Scotland which has been named and shamed the fly-tipping capital of Britain.

There is no other local authority where ordinary staff are facing daily rodent attacks while their council leader denigrates their legitimate concerns as “far right”. And nowhere other than Glasgow has responded to the deluge of abandoned waste and overflowing bins that residents have to endure day in day out by cutting refuse collection and actively making responsible waste disposal more difficult for hard-working families.

I have no doubt that councils throughout Scotland face challenges, but the truth is there is not a single council leader anywhere in the country who is more out of touch and prone to high-profile gaffes when addressing the people she is meant to represent by the desperate misrepresentations of reality that she says on a weekly basis.

Last year it was revealed that Glasgow City Council is the highest spending local authority in the whole of the UK on graffiti removal – spending twice as much as the next highest spending UK council and over five times as much as neighbouring North Lanarkshire Council. Well in her infinite wisdom last week Susan Aitken provided us with the reasoning for Glasgow’s graffiti epidemic – apparently it’s all down to “a wee ned with a spray can”.

No wonder journalist Stephen Daisley described her latest car crash interview as “Scotland’s worst council leader strikes again”.

It would seem to most people that spending twice as much money as any other local authority in Britain should mean that anti-social graffiti in Glasgow is cleared away twice as quickly?

What is the case is that in less than two months’ time, world leaders from across the globe will be descending on that very same SEC compound to attend the UK’s hosting of the UN’s environmental conference – COP26. For the sake of the planet I would hope their sole focus will be on finding common ground to address climate change. What they should not be subject to however, and what I doubt they will be impressed by, is the environmental devastation the SNP have wreaked on our city through their failure to address litter-strewn streets.

It is revealing that Susan Aitken chose to blame working class communities across Glasgow for the graffiti crisis by using the slur “ned”. When my group confronted a senior SNP councillor in Glasgow for endorsing graffiti on social media that praised her leader, Nicola Sturgeon, there was radio silence from Glasgow’s SNP leadership.

It seems there is one rule for the SNP in Glasgow and another for those from working class backgrounds like myself that the Council Leader thinks of as “neds”.

Well I have news for Susan Aitken – if there are indeed ‘non-educated delinquents’ in Glasgow as she claims, I would gently suggest she consider that her party has controlled Scotland’s education system for 14 years.

Directing her focus on schools, potholes, graffiti, bins and fly-tipping would serve Glasgow far better than continuing to act like everything in Glasgow is running smoothly.