Kenny Farquharson: At the wounded heart of Glasgow

Published on Saturday 6 March 2010 18:43

THERE'S a song by the marvellous Michael Marra called Mother Glasgow which starts like this: "In the second city of the Empire/Mother Glasgow watches all her weans/Trying hard to feed her little starlings/Unconsciously she clips their little wings."

Regardless of which part of the country we come from, most Scots take pride in Glasgow being a city of style, a city of culture, a city of swagger; an exemplar of the modern cosmopolitan European playground; the kind of city lauded by international travel guides as an essential destination for the world's party people.

All this is true. And yet we know that away from the city centre and the West End, Glasgow is a city of clipped wings. A city of blighted health and blighted opportunity. A city of sickening violence. And all its humanity and gallows humour cannot disguise the psychological desolation that paralyses too many of its inhabitants. This is familiar to us. So familiar it risks becoming simply a truism; the way things are.

We have our explanations, certainly. And our villains. Thatcher. Deindustrialisation. Unemployment. Drink. Drugs. But all the experts in the field will tell you these alone do not account for the scale and depth of Glasgow's problems. Other cities elsewhere – in the rest of Britain, in North America and in Eastern Europe – have experienced similar problems and coped; even flourished. So why hasn't Glasgow?

This week sees the publication of a book that tries to provide an answer, a brave book that makes uncomfortable reading and will make us question some of the psychological foundations of our identity as a nation. The Tears That Made The Clyde (Argyll, 8.99) is written by Carol Craig, chief executive of that curiously named Glasgow-based organisation, the Centre For Confidence and Well-being.

Craig's theory is a radical one. Yes, she says, of course the political and economic history of the past three or four decades has marked Glasgow (and, although she does not say this, other parts of Scotland as well), but the city's real problems have deeper and more human roots. They lie, she says, in Glaswegians' sense of self, of family, of society and ultimately of life itself, which Craig argues is the result of centuries – not decades – of conditioning.

What's remarkable is how Craig challenges notions that have become unthinking assumptions about who we are and how we live. The sentimental idea of the nourishing experience of growing up in a nuclear Scottish family, for example. Craig paints an alternative picture of selfish husbands who see themselves entitled to a life of pleasure independent of their families, and of resentful wives who lose themselves in escapism, usually watching US imports at the pictures. In one of the best sections of the book, Craig even junks the romantic notion of working class solidarity. In fact, she says, Glasgow workers had a finely calibrated social scale against which their fellow workers were constantly measured and found wanting, whether by the kind of house you lived in, the work you did or how "decent" your family was.

I have to say this struck a chord with my own family history in Dundee, where my Granny and many uncles and aunts worked in the jute mills. They may have all been workers together, but there was a distinct pecking order between the spinners (dissolute lower orders) and weavers ("respectable" working class). And before you ask, yes, my family was the latter.

Linked to this analysis, Craig suggests the Glaswegian working class's awareness of the pecking order of society meant they accepted – even embraced – the division between the working class and the middle class, creating an air of suspicion, which is still discernible today, about anyone with ambitions to better themselves.

Academics who analyse Glasgow's ills quite naturally focus in on factors that are quantifiable (housing, crime, diet, schooling, illness, etc). But Craig has the confidence (well, if she can't, who can?) to tackle the more intangible question of Glaswegians' scarcity of hope and self-esteem.

None of this paints a pretty picture, and you don't have to be an unemployed single mother on disability living in Barlanark to recognise the symptoms. Most of us will simply have to look around us, and then in the mirror.

Craig's analysis has its flaws, notably when she tries – bravely – to offer remedies to the problems she so successfully identifies. Under the heading "A Richer and Healthier Inner Life" her prescriptions include "spiritual practices such as meditation" and "more beauty in people's lives through... classical music". Call me a cynic but the day when Glasgow Green is full of locals sitting cross-legged on mats listening to Mahler on their iPods is, I suspect, still some way off. Too often the resolutely middle-class Craig sounds like she's describing a primitive tribe, not her neighbours. (The "classical music" reference is a real giveaway – the transcendent power of popular music, whether classic soul or modern dance music, simply doesn't occur to her, it seems.)

These are quibbles. This is an important book, a landmark in how we Scots understand who we are and how we got here. But I found reading it a deeply depressing experience. Because the remedies seem to require a retread of an entire national psyche. Craig calls the final chapter "Ringing the bell" – a reference to the poem about the Glasgow coat of arms that goes: "There's the tree that never grew. There's the bird that never flew. There's the fish that never swam. There's the bell that never rang." Glasgow's bell isn't ringing yet, but the alarm bells certainly are.