A CONSERVATIVE councillor who denied racism has been kicked out of the party over BNP ties following a National report on allegations of prejudice.
Stephen Goldsack was reported to a watchdog last week over comments he made in opposition to a planning application for a mosque.
At the time, he told this newspaper the claims were “nonsense”, stating: “There’s no way I’m a racist.”
READ MORE: Calls for North Lanarkshire Tory councillor Stephen Goldsack to resign in mosque row
But yesterday evidence emerged of close prior ties to the British National Party.
The material includes a 2011 post from the party in which “Steve Goldsack” is identified as the party’s “Scottish security adviser” and an image of him holding the BNP’s Holyrood election manifesto from that year. Among other policies, it included the following statement: “We would oppose planning applications to build or convert buildings into non-indigenous cultural or religious centres.”
Goldsack, who was elected to North Lanarkshire Council last year, did not respond to our calls for comment. Tory group leader Councillor Meghan Gallacher – who said our story on the mosque comments held “no truth and no weight”, calling on critics to apologise – declined to comment on the latest revelations.
READ MORE: Tory council group leader's attack on The National spectacularly backfires
But after The National passed the material to the Scottish Conservatives media team in Edinburgh, a spokesman said: “Councillor Goldsack’s membership of the Scottish Conservative Party has been rescinded, an action we took immediately after learning of this past affiliation.”
All 32 of the BNP’s Holyrood candidates lost their deposits in 2011, when they gained fewer than 16,000 votes in total. Yesterday, the BNP said they could not “confirm or deny whether a Mr Goldsack was a member or candidate for the British National Party”.
North Lanarkshire’s SNP group yesterday repeated calls for wider action from Ruth Davidson, with Councillor Danish Ashraf linking it to prior scandals involving Tory councillors and claiming she has a “personal duty to deal with” the Tories’ “extremism scandal”.
SNP group leader Councillor David Stocks said Gallacher – who claimed to have carried out an investigation into the allegations against Goldsack – should resign due to her handling of the matter, stating that she “clearly doesn’t take allegations of racism and bigotry seriously”.
Meanwhile, Labour MSP Anas Sarwar, chairman of the Scottish Parliament’s Cross Party Group on Tackling Islamophobia, said: “There is absolutely no place for the vile racism of the BNP in our society and it’s right that the Tories have swiftly kicked out Stephen Goldsack.
“All political parties have a duty to ensure that bigotry and racism is not tolerated. The comments Councillor Goldsack is alleged to have made were completely unacceptable, and show how much work we still have to do to tackle Islamophobia in Scotland.”
Opposing a bid for seven-day mosque facilities at a premises currently used by an Islamic faith charity in his Stepps, Muirhead and Chryston ward, Goldsack is said to have remarked “we can’t give more access to these people” and “if it was Church of Scotland it would be OK”. He says the first comment referred to individuals charged with a hate crime on March 30 and denied favouring the Kirk.
Ashraf said: “How was a man with a past in the BNP welcomed into the Tories? Did Ruth Davidson, or anyone else in the party, know about his past?
“Ms Davidson presides over a party with an embarrassing litany of councillors and candidates with disturbing and extremist views. It is way past time that she cleaned up her party.”
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