It is “nonsense” to suggest there is a cultural issue in Scottish Labour following the arrests of two senior councillors, Anas Sarwar has said.
The Scottish Labour leader said the situation is “deeply unfortunate” but he insisted all political parties have to deal with such cases.
It emerged on Monday that Glasgow Labour councillor Philip Braat had been charged in connection with stalking offences in October. The former lord provost has been suspended from the party pending an investigation.
In November, Inverclyde Council leader Stephen McCabe was separately charged with assault and threatening or abusive behaviour. The 60-year-old is accused of behaving in a threatening or abusive manner towards a woman in Kilmacolm on October 27. He is also accused of assaulting her.
McCabe later quit as local authority leader. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges. Speaking to journalists on Tuesday, Sarwar was asked whether the two cases suggest a cultural issue within his party.
“I think that’s utterly nonsense,” he said. “I think there will be individual cases that come across all individual political parties. But is this deeply unfortunate? Yes, but I’m not going to comment on live investigation.”
Sarwar was speaking while campaigning in Partick East and Kelvindale in Glasgow ahead of a by-election in the ward.
His visit comes just days after it was announced Glasgow City Council’s newest Labour councillor was disqualified after she failed to quit her job with the local authority. Mary McNab was voted in as the new councillor for the Glasgow North East ward on November 22.
But she failed to comply with legislation that required her to stand down from her job with the council the next working day, which automatically disqualified her from being an elected member. It means residents in the area could face another by-election.
Asked why McNab did not quit her council job, Sarwar said: “I think the whole thing is, to be honest, an administrative mess. “I think there will be lots of people on the council that feel disappointed. I think Mary herself will feel greatly disappointed. I think many people in the local ward will feel really disappointed.
“This is someone who was desperate to serve the local community, someone who was elected by the local community, and we’ve allowed an administrative mess-up on all sides to mean that we now have another by-election there which is really, really deeply frustrating. I think we could have worked in a way to resolve that, but we are in the situation we are in, and it’s deeply, deeply frustrating.”
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