From the Walk of Fame to Scotland's streets of shame

Published on Tuesday 10 November 2009 19:51

GLASGOW has this to cheer. It is soon to have its own version of the Hollywood Walk of Fame with plaques marking the city's great figures. It will run alongside the Clyde towards the Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre. But extend this some three miles north-east and we come to a Glasgow that is not great at all: Springburn and the scene of a by-election contest that finally ends tomorrow.

Glasgow North East ranks as one of the most socially desperate areas in Britain. Website UK Polling Report describes the constituency as "scarred by gangs, deprivation and hard drugs". Outside parts of Dennistoun and new developments to the north at Robroyston, the seat "consists of some of the most degraded, deprived and crime-ridden parts of the UK: the heroin-ravaged Possilpark, the tower blocks of Sighthill and Red Road, decayed housing estates of Springburn and the amenity-free Milton, product of earlier attempts at slum clearance". Amid the bleak statistics on unemployment, drug and alcohol addiction and welfare dependency, these stand out: more than half the working age population has no qualifications. More than half live in what is euphemistically called "social housing". And almost one in five homes are without a bathroom and central heating. The figures on crime and addiction alone would disgrace some of the worst parts of the former Soviet Union.

If the desperate social condition of this constituency was not enough to drive voters to the polls for change, the prolonged campaign by no less than 13 candidates should surely guarantee a high turn-out. But, according to Eddie Barnes who has been covering this contest for The Scotsman, voters seem quite unengaged by this contest. Labour, which has held the seat since 1931, is favourite to win. The general mood is that the result does not matter. Little here will change. Some fear a turn-out as low as 25 per cent.

This constituency, and this contest that has notably failed to rouse, is a scandal. The celebrity socialist George Galloway, campaigning yesterday for Tommy Sheridan, has an explanation for a Labour return despite decades of deprivation and neglect under its stewardship. It is one as insulting to Labour as it is dismissive of voters. Labour, he says, has "got fat on the unthinking, uncritical, blind-thinking of people in constituencies like this". Offensive as this is, it admits that not only has Glasgow North East suffered an economic and social collapse but that conventional politics of redress and solution have failed miserably.

Springburn is a challenge to which this campaign has signally failed to rise. It requires a boldness of solution on jobs, housing and regeneration, one that must start with a concerted attack on its self-inflicted wounds. For what is clear beyond doubt is that its problems cannot be tackled without the active motivation and commitment of people themselves to set about change. Achieving just that would be a greater walk for Glasgow to cheer.