The National:

IT’S often been said that the Scottish Labour leadership can be rather out-of-touch.

That has been handily demonstrated by the party falling further and further into irrelevance due to its intransigence on indyref2, in loyalty to the Precious Union.

It looks like it’s not just the leadership who have trouble reading a room – in North Lanarkshire, it’s the council group too.

North Lanarkshire Council (NLC) is run by a minority Labour administration.

As we reported today, by reviving the Better Together spirit and teaming up with the Tories, the party has just overturned a ban in the area on hugely controversial weedkillers that use glyphosate.

Glyphosate has sparked massive rows with uncertainty over its impact on biodiversity, bees and even humans. Scientific research has been plentiful and ongoing.

An NLC spokesperson told us: “The council took into account the draft risk assessment prepared by international scientists for the European Union which concluded that glyphosate is not carcinogenic, genotoxic or toxic to reproduction.”

The SNP hit back that the “jury is still out” with many glyphosate-free alternatives stocked by retailers.

However, so starved of electoral successes are Scottish Labour, they couldn’t resist turning to Twitter to gloat with a fancy graphic about reversing a ban on a weedkiller that might kill bees.

The NorthLan Labour group wrote: “CONFIRMED: Labour overturn the SNP’s decision to ban weedkiller in North Lanarkshire.”

“CONFIRMED” was, of course, written in an appropriately egregious font.

It didn’t go down well.

Twitter users got to work mocking the ridiculous message. We’ll let social media speak for itself:

We know Scottish Labour will be jealous of the greens this week... but surely this is a bit much?