A Fife Labour MP has strongly dismissed claims by a leading SNP councillor that he made “ill-judged and deeply offensive” remarks on nationality and ethnicity during a debate about Scottish independence.
Pro-Independence campaigners in Fife claim that Dunfermline and West Fife MP Thomas Docherty made inappropriate use of the word “foreigner” during a referendum hustings by Unison Fife Retired Members at Fife House on Thursday.
Fife Council SNP Group leader Peter Grant, who represented Yes Scotland at the meeting, said Mr Docherty claimed that in the event of a Yes vote, for thousands of families where one parent was born in Scotland and the other was born somewhere else in the UK “everyone is going to have to decide which of their grandparents is going to be a foreigner to them”.
Mr Grant said: “These remarks are not only ill judged but deeply offensive. I have relatives who were born in England and have lived there all their lives. No one will ever tell me to think differently of them because they were born in a different country.”
But Mr Docherty said he stood by his remarks which had been “taken out of context” and accused Mr Grant of “missing some rather crucial words” in his press statement.
He said: “The key bit that Peter has dropped is that I’m talking about my own family. My father is Scottish, my mother is English, my wife is Scottish, my kids were born in Kirkcaldy, I was born in England. We are all British.
“What Peter and the rest of the SNP is trying to do is to make the rest of the UK a foreign country. They would make other people foreigners.”