THE SNP has elected its new leader on Glasgow City Council, with the party's deputy also remaining in place despite his recent criminal conviction.
Susan Aitken, the opposition SNP's social work spokeswoman, had been favourite to take over from Graeme Hendry, who stepped down for family reasons after two years in the post. She defeated west end councillor Kenny McLean for the post.
However, her election by a convincing majority of the city's 27 SNP councillors has been overshadowed by the continuation as deputy of Councillor Billy McAllister.
He was re-elected unopposed, despite being convicted last week at Glasgow Sheriff Court of acting in a threatening or abusive manner. He was fined for shouting and swearing at a man who classes himself as disabled at a 'bedroom tax' meeting.
It prompted calls from Shadow Scottish Secretary and Labour Glasgow East MP Margaret Curran for the SNP to take action against Mr McAllister, who has been deputy to the last four SNP group leaders on the council.
Ms Aitken, 42, has worked for Age Concern Scotland, at Holyrood for MSP Christina McKelvie and, on a temporary basis, for the SNP parliamentary group central office.
Ms Aitken had been given the party's lead role on social work in May 2012 and an SNP spokesman said she had "successfully held Labour to account over issues such as its decision to close learning disability day centres, introduce charging for community alarms without consultation and, most recently, questioning the need to introduce charging for elderly day care services".
The councillor said: "I am hugely honoured to have been chosen as the new leader of the opposition.
"I know there is a great deal to do over the coming months and years. Labour's leadership in Glasgow is tired. Scratch the surface and there is little vision for our great city.
"I will be arguing strongly that only the powers of independence will provide the opportunities to improve the lives of Glaswegians and the economy of our city."
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article