interaction with local Health and Social Care Services.  I now sit on the Integrated Joint Health and Social Care Board for West Dunbartonshire as a volunteer to express the views of unpaid carers at board meetings.  All my children are in education, either at primary, secondary, college or university.  I believe myself to be very well informed on the current issues with respect to education impacting upon our education providers, children and young people. 

As an engineer, a volunteer with the Health and Social Care Board and with a large family my opportunities for hobbies are very limited.  Whenever there is an opportunity, I occupy myself with DIY tasks and I always have a project or two that I’m working upon. My weekends are generally spent either covered in sawdust or oil, at the top of a ladder or under the floor.

Why am I standing as the Reform Councillor for West Dunbartonshire, Kilpatrick Ward 4?

Kilpatrick has supported Douglas McAllister MP as a Labour Councillor since 2003.  For a period of time he held the position as provost until he was elected to the Westminster Government this year.

I see McAllister as the epitome of what the Labour Party has become and his recent actions as a complete betrayal of those of have supported and elected him.

At the Council Budget meeting in March this year he refused a fellow councillor with a disability the additional time they required and were entitled to in order to read over a complicated 18 page document.  This led to a public apology for his behaviour after he was criticised by the Trade Union.  Following his election to Westminster he then voted to remove winter fuel payments for pensioners and retaining the two child benefit cap for child benefit, with the Labour Party taking the line that ‘those with the broadest shoulders bear the heaviest burden’.    

Following this Labour Councillor Martin Rooney voted to cut funding to the Carers of West Dunbartonshire, a third-party charity organisation who support unpaid carers, which are predominately elderly.  Alongside cuts to the Ben View Resource Centre, which provide hot meals and a bathing service for the elderly.  At the same time voting to cut funding to Ysortit, who are another third-party organisation who help and support children who find themselves becoming young carers and children from Kinship and foster care backgrounds.  None of these organisations were consulted about the cuts and it was only following several complaints that the service managers were eventually permitted to attend the board meeting to make a 5 minute deposition to set out the impact of the cuts.  I was left completely shocked by the lack of any sort of impact assessment and the lack of care or compassion that had gone into this decision.  Later in the year further cruel cuts were made to kinship care funding.  This cut did not undergo any impact assessment and wasn’t even raised at board level.  All kinship carers got was a letter to say their funding would stop!

Labour gifted the council to the SNP in August after a disastrous row over who would succeed McAllister as provost.  The row resulted in two Labour councillors resigning from Labour and they now stand as independent councillors.  This led to our Labour council just giving up and handing the leadership of the council over to the SNP!

Our Labour led council are a complete and utter disaster and our Labour MP has completely betrayed everyone who voted for him to try and benefit his own political career. 

We can’t allow Labour to win here again.  However, I fear they will if we don’t stop them.

An SNP run council is not one that we voted for and certainly not one that we want or are happy with.  The SNP have been in power at Holyrood since 2007 and since then it has been disaster after disaster.  Notwithstanding the repeated calls for another divisive referendum on Independence, which Scotland voted against in 2014, wasting hundreds of millions of pounds of our money.  Millions have been wasted on vanity projects, simply given away overseas or trying to prosecute anyone they disagree with and even trying to prosecute each other!

The SNP government could have stepped into the winter fuel heating allowance crisis and funded the payments themselves.  However, instead they decided to focus on creating a list of 24 different genders and defending their long held position of allowing male rapists into female prisons and ignoring calls from charities to make rape crisis centres female only safe spaces. 

The SNP government have long promised to irradicate child poverty and have been failing on this policy for the last 17 years.  They have promised to tackle drugs and crime and have failed for the last 17 years.  Even when funding was offered by the EU the SNP couldn’t even organised themselves to apply for the funding.  However, their minister for health did seem to be very well organised when it comes to providing a government funded Ipad for his own children to watch football whilst on holiday.

Neither Labour or the SNP deserve your vote.

I am standing as a councillor because I believe enough is enough and residents need at least one councillor who will be open, honest and able to challenge all the further cuts that are sure to come with the current administration. 

Please don’t let them win again and vote David Smith Reform UK in the Kilpatrick by election on November 28^th so that we can defend against cuts and champion those who are vulnerable within our community who might otherwise have no voice.