This morning on Good Morning Scotland, Ruth Davidson spoke on recent racist remarks made from within the Conservative party. Just to recap: Douglas Ross’ divisive comments pertaining to Gypsy and Traveller communities , Alistair Majury’s tweet using an offensive term for Catholic people suggesting that all Catholics sexually abuse children, compared Scottish nationalists to Nazis, and Councillor Robert Davies posted a series of tweets alongside black and white photographs of a group of black people beside a cargo plane, with comments such as “keep your loin cloths with you at all times. Spears go in the overhead locker”.

Within this interview on Good Morning Scotland, Ruth went on to say the following:

"They've also gone for diversity training, because I want to change their behaviour…and on top of that, they're in talks with an anti-Semitic charity called Show Racism The Red Card, because they want to be able to change their behaviour."

We have received communications from the Conservative Press Office that the anti-Semitic comment made by Ruth was a slip of the tongue. However, we need to reiterate that Show Racism the Red Card is an anti-racism charity working across all ethnicities, cultures, religions and nationalities. Moreover, such a comment can be potentially damaging to a small organisation like ours.

Secondly, last week (https://www.commonspace.scot/articles/11547/scottish-tories-slammed-after-reinstating-councillors-embroiled-racism-storm) we did call on the Tory party to have the three Party Members work with us and to participate in anti-racism education training, but we have not had any discussions with them as was stated in the interview.

While writing this article, we did get a phone call from the Conservative Press Office with Ruth Davidson passing on her apologies as she got our charity mixed up with Nil by Mouth. Nil by Mouth is one of our respected and esteemed partners and the work that they do is so valuable and we would like Majury to participate in anti-sectarian with them. However, we would still like Douglas Ross to participate in our ‘Tackling Gypsy, Roma and Traveller Bullying’ programme with us which is co-delivered by members of the Travelling Community and we would like Robert Davies to participate in our ‘Tackling Contemporary Racism’ programme with us.