Labour councillor denies tweet slur was offensive

Senior Reporter

Friday 24 February 2012

A LABOUR councillor who referred to an SNP stalwart as a "p****" on a social network- ing site has denied the slur was offensive.

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STEF LACH

Jim Docherty, a Labour councillor representing East Kilbride South on South Lanarkshire Council, used his personal Twitter feed to post an attack on Alex Neil, the Scottish Government's Infrastructure and Capital Investment Secretary.

The tweet read: "Alex Neil MSP. M is for monkey S is for spare P is for P**** biggest in parliment."

Mr Docherty has used his Twitter account, which he created at the start of the year, to question the SNP's decision to award Forth crossing contracts to foreign firms.He has also hit out at the Scottish Government's funding of a new visitor centre at the site of the Battle of Bannockburn.The centre will cost around £9 million in total, with £5m coming from Holyrood.His tweet on the matter read: "£10 million for a Visitor Centre for the man that betrayed William Wallace what a travesty the SNP are full of traitors." He followed it up with: "Just watched that Traitor Robert the Bruce in Brave Heart why are we spending £12 million on a Vistor Center for him at Stirling Castle."When asked if he thought referring to a political rival as a "p****" was acceptable, Mr Docherty replied: "My Twitter site has nothing to do with my role as a councillor or my standing in public life. Unfinished words are for the individual's own interpretation and words, no matter how you look at them, have many meanings. Nothing on my tweet was as offensive as Alex Neil awarding multimillion-pound contracts for a Forth Road Bridge to everywhere in the world but Scotland, and buying steel from India when it could be made in Motherwell."All this at Scottish taxpayers' expense – now that is really an offence against the people of Scotland."Since The Herald contacted Mr Docherty, the offending "p****" tweet has been removed.Mr Neil said he was treating the incident "with the contempt it deserves".He added: "It's clear this man isn't fit to hold public office."A Scottish Labour spokesman said: "Alex Neil has infuriated people in Lanarkshire by claiming the hard-working council staff were 'bloated' and famously refused to apologise for calling a Labour MP a Nazi, but we will remind Mr Docherty to express his opinions more eloquently in future." He is not the first politician to have been caught out when using social networking websites. Shadow Health Minister Diane Abbott sparked a race row in January by suggesting on Twitter "white people love playing divide and rule". She later apologised for any offence caused after claims the comments were racist. Glasgow South Labour MP Tom Harris, meanwhile, had to quit his role as the party's social media adviser in Scotland after he posted a spoof video depicting Alex Salmond as Adolf Hitler on YouTube. The video was a reworking of the 2004 film Downfall, which chronicles the final days of Hitler in his Berlin bunker and has been parodied hundreds of times online.Mr Harris stood down from the social media role at the request of Johann Lamont, the party's leader, although he claimed there was "a lot of faux indignation" about the video, describing it as "bad timing, not bad taste".

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Labour councillor denies tweet slur was offensive

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