I USED my column last week to highlight the latest in a series of car-crash interviews given by the SNP leader of Glasgow City Council, Susan Aitken.

She continued to downplay Glasgow’s waste crisis and blamed the city’s graffiti epidemic on “a wee ned with a spray can”. Ned, as I wrote last week, is a term of derision for working class communities in Scotland.

You will note that this insult is never thrown at those from the kind of middle-class backgrounds that are overwhelmingly represented on the SNP and Green benches both at Holyrood and Glasgow City Council.

The truth is that people who grew up like I did are sick and tired of being preached to from the moral high ground by champagne socialists whose primary experience of hardship involves fighting for the last bottle of pinot grigio at Waitrose.

Susan Aitken’s recent address to the 23rd State of the City Economy Conference epitomised just how out of touch with reality her SNP administration is.

Glaswegians are fed up with the SNP’s empty rhetoric around supporting small businesses, the city’s environment and our cultural assets.

The proof of their disdain for the basics of the day job is written all over our streets.

That disdain speaks to an underlying contempt for working class communities that councillor Aitken betrayed by her disparaging comments about “non-educated delinquents”.

While the delegates for the forthcoming COP26 conference might see the benefits of her purported “spruce up”, I suspect the residents of Easterhouse, Drumchapel and Shettleston won’t be receiving the same VIP treatment.

Their roads will continue to be littered with potholes and refuse; their bins will continue to be overflowing and under collected; and fly-tipping in their communities will continue to blight their living environment.

It is not only Susan Aitken whose comments have betrayed a deep-seated antipathy towards working class communities.

Labour deputy leader Angela Rayner insulted hundreds of thousands of Conservative voters in Scotland and throughout the UK when she described Conservatives as “scum”.

The excuse proffered by her allies for this disgusting language was that it was a reflection of how people from working class backgrounds talk.

How revealing it is that Labour and SNP politicians have such an outdated and offensive caricature of the working class that they believe us to be walking around with a spray can at the ready spewing profanity.

The truth is that working-class Brits are more concerned with trying to get to work, despite the SNP’s anti-car agenda. We’re concerned with the quality of our schools, despite the SNP’s decimation of Scotland’s education system.

We’re concerned with ensuring the streets are safe, despite the SNP’s soft-touch approach to criminal justice.

We’re concerned with ensuring the NHS is there for us at our time of need, despite the SNP lecturing us to “think twice” about phoning an ambulance.

As someone who has lived in the East End of Glasgow all my life, I can categorically inform Susan Aitken and Angela Rayner that these are the concerns I encounter on a daily basis and the failure of the SNP and Labour parties to address these concerns is exactly why working-class communities no longer believe their empty promises.