Scottish minister demands Labour expel councillor over racist remark

Scotland’s transport minister, Humza Yousaf, has demanded that a councillor who made an Islamophobic comment about him be expelled from the Scottish Labour party.

Jim Dempster, a Labour member of Dumfries and Galloway council, told transport officials at a meeting on Tuesday that “no one would have seen [Yousaf] under his burqa”.

This is the party’s third row over racism since the beginning of the year.

Dempster has since written to Yousaf, Scotland’s first Muslim cabinet minister, to apologise and has been suspended by the Scottish Labour party pending an investigation.

But Yousaf has called for him to resign as a councillor, adding that “only expulsion from Scottish Labour will do”.

Yousaf told the Guardian that, despite the support he had received from friends, colleagues and strangers since the incident, he remained angry. “I am angrier than I’ve ever been about abuse of this nature, and I’ve not been able to shake it off. It was the brazen nature of the remarks, which were made in front of my officials and members of the public.”

He also warned that diversity training, which Dempster has asked to attend, “shouldn’t be seen as a punishment”. “It’s now being used by certain politicians as a way of absolving themselves, but the obvious stuff of ‘don’t be racist’ isn’t even included in that training.”

In his written apology, Dempster said he understood “how offensive and terrible what I said will sound”, but insisted “this stupid and ill-judged remark is not representative of who I am”.

A senior Transport Scotland official who attended Tuesday’s meeting reported that Dempster had been stating his opinion that Yousaf was not concerned about road transport issues in the local area. Dempster was told the minister had attended the south-west transport conference and had met residents in the village of Springholm, to which he replied: “He may have been at Springholm but no one would have seen him under his burqa.”

Yousaf was supported by the former Scottish Labour leadership candidate Anas Sarwar, who launched a cross-party group on tackling racism and Islamophobia last month. Sarwar described the comment as “crass, stupid, offensive and unacceptable”, adding that it was right to challenge it “no matter who or where it is from”.

Sarwar’s group has set out eight proposals, four of which were accepted at Scottish Labour’s spring conference in Dundee last weekend, including the shortlisting of minority ethnic candidates, diverse selection committees and mechanisms for anonymous reporting of abuse.

Sarwar himself has claimed that racist comments were made about him by the leader of Scottish Labour’s South Lanarkshire council group, Davie McLachlan, who has also been suspended from the party pending an investigation but denies the allegation.

Last month, one of the party’s Westminster MPs, Hugh Gaffney, apologised after making “deeply offensive and unacceptable” remarks about the LGBT community and Chinese people at a Burns supper in Edinburgh. Gaffney was reprimanded by the party and said he would undergo equality and diversity training.