Glasgow - City Of The Rat

Glasgow in Scotland has a rat problem ....

Rats Run Loose In Glasgow's Garnethill

 .... and it has a rodent problem as well, with two (or more) council workers bitten by 'large rats' recently.

Now as the Scottish National Party (SNP) has completely usurped the Labour Party as the party of governance in Scotland, and they themselves had ruled Scotland's cities for over 70 years, its a bit rich that neither party can take responsibility for the current state of its infrastructure and society. 

Glasgow for example has been Labour or SNP run for nearly a century but is blighted by rubbish (the SNP council decided to move once-fortnightly collections back by an extra week), and fly-tipping (which has skyrocketed in the city, since Glasgow City Council implemented a £35 bulk waste charge in April 2021), as well as some of the UK's highest poverty, drug death (1,339 drug fatalities last year confirmed Scotland as the drugs death leader of Europe), and crime rates. 

But yet both parties are still infected with the self created myth that Conservative Prime Minister Mrs Thatcher, somehow 'ruined Scotland,' and was directly responsible for all and any of the current ills in that land. This despite that she was deposed by her own party in 1990 ... yes thirty years ago and that the Labour Party via Blair / Brown, ruled Britain for well over ten of those intervening years.

So perhaps its no surprise that Glasgow's SNP council leader Susan Aitken has blamed Margaret Thatcher for Glasgow's rat-infested streets, and then claiming that 'all cities have rats,' but admitting to 'possibly two' occasions in which council workers had been hospitalised after 'small incidents' with rats ... an admission that she then later denied. The GMB union has said it is aware of four binmen being taken to hospital after rat attacks ...

"I do not, in any way, shy away from the challenges that we face as a city, historic challenges that have been around for many, many years. Much of them a legacy of our post-industrial past when the Thatcher government walked away and abandoned Glasgow and left in neglect communities right across this city ...... Our cleansing employees occasionally experience rats. It's also not something that is unique to Glasgow, it's something that's happening right across the UK - all cities have rats."

... This is the sort of nonsense that makes Scotland and Glasgow a laughing stock, as World leaders from 120 countries, descended on it for the Cop26 climate summit.

To top it off, the ScotRail staff and Glasgow's rubbish workers were considering strike action as well (The rail workers were bought off), but Ms Aitken had said that Glasgow only needed a wee ''spruce up,'' and is not actually run down and dirty, and an opinion she stood by but also saying that Thatcher was responsible for the 'challenges' facing Scotland's second city. The 'spruce up' Ms Aitken ordered included the removal of bath tubs, window frames, mattresses, broken furniture and construction waste that were dumped underneath the M8 motorway between Glasgow and Edinburg on September 15. 

COP26 Glasgow - Thatcher's Grandchild

Of course the greatest irony of all, is that Margaret Thatcher is the grand mother of COP26, as she was the first major political world leader to warn the world of the 'Greenhouse Effect' and its likely economic and societal impact. She understood the science of climate change and did her best to alert the world to its dangers. Mrs Thatcher gave a speech to the Royal Society in London in 1988, and followed up with an address on climate change to the United Nations in November 1989, where she warned of the peril that had “grown clearer than any other in both urgency and importance.”

She even stated that climate change was the key existential threat to the planet, after the USSR had collapsed, with a speech to the Conservative Party Conference in December 1989. Before she was deposed, she also ensured the UK Treasury had funding and resources to start work on modelling climate change and its economic consequences. 

Still Ms Aitkin's comments have provided the only laugh of the COP26 event .... Some of the resulting mocking of Ms Aitken, included the observation that if Ms Aitken was linking the purported rat infestation to the Thatcher era, then, if that were the case, the rats had a “longer lifespan than the locals”.