Target voters: OAPs

Published on Friday 22 April 2011 11:44

THURSDAY, for the pensioners of the Whiteinch area of Glasgow, means exercise class. Leotards are not required; this select group meets in the communal lounge of a sheltered housing development, pushes the chairs to one side and then jiggles gently under the supervision of a retired occupational therapist.

The class started life as a Glasgow City Council initiative, to keep stroke victims mobile and active. Then the cuts started, the teacher took early retirement and the exercises stopped. The class, not a group to take no for an answer, persuaded her to start it again, in the lounge of the Primrose Court sheltered housing development, on a Thursday morning, in exchange for petrol money and a cup of coffee after.

Aged mostly between 70 and 90, they are hugely reliant on the state, for the big things - income, housing, health care - as well as smaller pleasures, such as their Thursday morning stretch out. And while kind words for individual politicians are as rare, around the table, as natural teeth, they are all keen voters. Every single one will be at their polling stations on 5 May. Except the ones with mobility problems who qualify for a postal vote. One of them, 86-year-old Margaret Morrison, has cast hers already.

So cuts and changes - in council services, welfare payments and the NHS - are a universal worry. Not just for the individuals around the table, but for their children with health problems of their own and grandchildren about to start university. There is also general weariness over the minutiae of claiming benefits and negotiating an ever-shifting system. As a plate of Easter cakes does the round, there is a heated debate over who is eligible for extra heating payments.

Nurses, they all agree, are crucial and must be protected. Doctors are less popular, possibly because they rarely make house calls. There is much happy recollection of the golden era of the GP popping in for a chat on his way home from the surgery. "Now I phone up," sniffs one lady, "and they just send a prescription." Matrons are much missed. "Everything was shining bright," recalls Hugh Shearer wistfully. Isabel Simpson frowns at him. "You," she says accusingly, across the chocolate digestives, "are living in the old days."

Holyrood 2011 coverage in full

• Iain Gray under fire after poor show in new poll

• Eddie Barnes: concerns of leaking support in once-solid constituencies is a measure of the task facing Iain Gray

• Kenny Farquharson: What Labour needs is some six appeal

• Aidan Smith: Annabel Goldie risks becoming a national institution, despite her politics

• Target voters: OAPs

• John Curtice: The OAP vote

• Peter Ross: Socialists who go it alone

The SNP plan to centralise police services and reduce the number of forces has gone down like a thrash metal anthem at a tea dance.

"If we don't have the police here, the place will go right up the wall," says Shearer, who is 78 and has been working out in a jacket and tie. "And how will they get away up here if they are based in town?"

And while officers from the nearby Partick station can be spotted whizzing around the area on their mountain bikes, there is general support for more boots on the ground.

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"I like to see them walking about the street," says Rena Taylor, 73. "Like they did years ago."

Pensioners' concessionary travel is much more agreeable. Everyone around the table appreciates their bus pass. It gets Taylor up to see her family in Fort William. "I just pay to book the seat," she explains. This costs 50p. "It encourages more people to use buses," adds Simpson, 74. It also gives a small reduction on train tickets, although this is not felt to be as generous as it could be.

Individual politicians might be advised to leave Primrose Court off their must-canvas list. "That George Galloway makes me shudder," says Simpson. "I cannot stand him. He was in here and he got flung out." It turns out that she does not mean that Galloway was evicted from this particular building because he interrupted EastEnders or failed to wait his turn at the dart board. Simpson is going back to the 1980s, when Galloway was MP for the Hillhead constituency.

"This used to be a dry area (free of alcohol outlets]," she explains. "Now we have all these pubs and licensed grocers." Pointing through the lounge window she indicates Dumbarton Road, which is hardly Faliraki but does have several outlets for the sale of intoxicating liquor. "He changed all that." Who, surveying Galloway's lurid CV, would have thought that bringing cans of lager to a parched stretch of western Glasgow 30 years ago would still count against him?

No other politician prompts anything like such a specific grudge. In this traditional Labour-voting area, Iain Gray appears to have underwhelmed the grey-haired voters: "Awful withdrawn", suggests one. "Not forthcoming," offers another. Nicola Sturgeon - "wee Nicola" - is grudgingly respected. She "does her rounds". She "speaks her mind". She might, the table unenthusiastically agrees, "be all right".

Annabel Goldie gets a universal thumbs down. "She is," pronounces Simpson, "living in the past. She is no' liked at all."

Tavish Scott looks like "a nice person". Then a lady who had previously claimed not to be following the election, or to have a clue about what was going on, pipes up. "I saw him on a quad bike on telly last night." The image of the geography teacher of Scottish politics on board a macho four-wheeled vehicle silences the table. For at least ten seconds.

Then Aijaz Lodhi intervenes. At 60, he is the youngster of the group and, despite being born in Pakistan, one of only two Scottish Nationalists. He gives a coherent impromptu party political broadcast on the SNP's achievements in Holyrood: tuition fees, prescription charges, the council tax freeze. Everyone listens politely. Taylor expresses approval for Alex Salmond's personality: "He is clean, no scandals, not glamorous like Tony Blair or David Cameron. He doesn't bring his family into politics or rely on them to get him votes."

The cakes are finished, the coffee cups cleared away.Everyone seems to have enjoyed discussing Tavish on his quad bike and Nicola's stewardship of their beloved NHS. But not one person around the table admits to changing the way they vote over their lifetime and it will take more than a free prescription to change their minds now.