What Edinburgh's SNP group leader Adam McVey calls 'strong leadership' is actually an intolerance of other people's opinions – John McLellan

This is the same Councillor Ross who, if well-connected SNP sources are to be believed, Councillor McVey would dearly like to see dumped as an SNP candidate for this May’s council elections, although he denies it.

Perhaps it’s because of Councillor Ross’s determination to secure the rebuilding of the Corstorphine community centre which his group refuses to fund, or maybe his resignation from Marketing Edinburgh which the short-sighted administration chose to abolish.

Or is it retribution for resigning from the SNP’s finance and audit committee over the whereabouts of funds raised specifically for the independence campaign, which have been the subject of a fraud investigation?

One way or another, as the former group leader ousted by Councillor McVey’s faction, Councillor Ross is someone who knows his own mind, and so too does planning convener Neil Gardiner who is apparently also in the leadership’s crosshairs for having the temerity to offer differing views to theirs behind closed doors.

But it’s the treatment of Councillor Alison Dickie which is the window on how this coalition operates. She has not challenged SNP group policy or abstained on a budget vote, but as deputy education convener dedicated herself to ensuring Edinburgh’s schools are as safe as they can be for staff and pupils.

Her mistake, if it can be called that, was not to accept everything in the council management garden was rosy, because too many staff members with serious and justifiable concerns confided in her and she felt a sense of duty towards them.

Issues were raised, but this was interpreted as “playing into the Tories hands” because she challenged a slavish adherence to the status quo.

For her trouble, she found herself ostracised and insulted, and like Councillors Ross and Gardiner, suffered the ignominy of an extended vetting process, despite being an ex-parliamentary candidate.

Yet she has been vindicated by Susanne Tanner QC’s inquiry which concluded there was “not a universally positive, open, safe and supportive whistleblowing and organisational culture for the raising of and responding to concerns of wrongdoing” at the council, and identified parts of the children’s services department and some schools as “problematic”.

For performing her public duty, the reward from Councillor McVey was to make her position untenable and now she has quit.

Councillor McVey’s article talks about “strong leadership”, and it could be argued his direction is indeed muscular, if it’s defined by a vindictive intolerance of opinions divergent from his own. It certainly takes a special kind of determination to lose five members of a group of 19 and still seek to nobble two others.

Nor should it be forgotten that such was the poisonous atmosphere in Councillor McVey’s coalition that Labour’s deputy finance convener Marion Donaldson walked away in 2019, apparently to “move on from party politics” but then resurfaced as Labour’s candidate in Caithness for last year’s Holyrood elections.

And this is from an administration which is quick to call foul against the opposition for the toxic atmosphere in the council chamber when they generate enough venom amongst themselves for a whole tangle of rattlesnakes.

Forget party affiliation, Edinburgh deserves better than this excuse for leadership.

John McLellan is a Conservative councillor for Craigentinny/Duddingston

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