Edinburgh Council elections: Only the Conservatives can fix this great city's problems – Iain Whyte

Most Edinburgh people will have a view about the city council, often uncomplimentary even if they don’t always know who is responsible, or why things are going wrong.

If you don't like the Labour/SNP coalition under group leaders Cammy Day and Adam McVey, vote Conservative, says Iain Whyte (Picture: Ian Georgeson)

Election campaigns are an opportunity to air the problems and seek real change, but this campaign has sunk to new lows in terms of some who see lack of public awareness as an opportunity, combined with a condescending view that voters have short memories.

The Labour council campaign has been particularly astonishing. In power for ten long years, they say they want to concentrate on basic services like cleaning streets and repairing our roads but fail to mention they have been in charge of the neglect.

Their hypocrisy knows no bounds. One Labour candidate has taken up a petition to compensate local traders in Roseburn whose businesses have been hit by council roadworks outside their premises, even though Labour councillors voted down a Conservative motion seeking exactly that.

Across the city, Labour are delivering leaflets saying they oppose the SNP’s workplace parking charge while their council group leader has been one of its most enthusiastic champions, even keener to lump this extra cost onto businesses and their employees than some in the SNP.

In truth, if you vote Labour in Edinburgh you will get SNP, the same cosy coalition we’ve endured for a decade. When challenged to act on failures or unpopular SNP policies, Labour councillors could not have been clearer they were very much their policies too.

The SNP suffers the same amnesia, claiming on social media that the vast cost and delay of the first tram line was the fault of “the last lot”. Yet you must go back to before 2007 when the SNP was not a partner in the city’s administration, running the city in coalition with the Lib Dems until 2012. Fifteen years of continuous power, but the problems are apparently someone else’s fault.

Don’t let them pull this confidence trick. They’ve no interest in changing. For ten years they have spent their time publishing glossy but meaningless strategies or concentrating on grandiose, overpriced projects like the trams.

Meanwhile Edinburgh now has the dirtiest streets of any city in Scotland; our roads and pavements have a £77m repair backlog; they’ve inflicted “Spaces for People” on us and, most shockingly, now rely on whistle-blowers to expose the mistreatment of children and young people in the council’s care.

All those grandiose strategies are attempts to distract voters from looking around in dismay at the things that need fixed. They even want to build more tram lines, when the roads they will dig up to do so are third world.

The council-knows-best-attitude won’t change unless you change who’s in charge, and that’s been the SNP for 15 years, thanks to their Labour coalition partners, even as they focus on their independence crusade. Now the Greens are in government with them, their far-left student politics aren’t a joke but for real.

Only the Edinburgh Conservatives are strong enough in the council to bring the real change that Edinburgh desperately needs. You may not support us nationally, but for Edinburgh’s sake help us to clean up our city.

Iain Whyte is Edinburgh Council’s Conservative group leader

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