Gerry Hassan: A tale of two cities, both called Glasgow

GLASGOW has long been a city of paradoxes: a place of pride alongside disconnection; of supposed radicalism and also conservatism; and of rebellion alongside acquiescence to authority.

One prominent UK politician with first-hand experience of this is Vincent Cable, who stood for Labour in Glasgow Hillhead at the 1970 election and was a city councillor from 1971-74 in the last days of the corporation.

Cable's recent memoir Free Radical contains, among other reflections, his thoughts on his time in Glasgow. The challenges to the council and the city at the time were multiple and complex – and strangely familiar.

The city council was committed to comprehensive slum clearance and the building of tower blocks and huge peripheral schemes. The main controversy at the time, according to Cable, was "how to speed up" slum clearance.

The appearance of problems in tower blocks was initially dismissed as the product of "choosy" and "difficult" people who lacked "gratitude" towards the council. A backlash began to challenge this and view refurbishment of old tenements as the best way forward.

Motorways were being built around the city and were seen, like tower blocks, as "emblems of a modernised, dynamic city". The slow awakening of an amenity and local environment movement was just beginning to challenge this.

At the same time, poverty and social deprivation were still seen, in Cable's words, in "rather simple and mechanistic terms" as about "basically, poor housing". That this deprivation continued in the new housing schemes caused these assumptions to be questioned.

Labour council politics were characterised, according to Cable, by "a strong whiff of Tammany Hall" shaped by "abuses of patronage". The main divisions in the City Chambers were about background: the trade unionist councillors from the shipyards and engineering versus the middle-class teachers and lawyers, the latter including Mr Cable.

In the early 1970s, the council still had "unfettered control" over revenue and domestic rates, and was able to appoint teachers and allocate tenancies from a stock of 150,000-and-rising council houses.

Reflecting on his time as a Glasgow councillor, Cable commented: "Three decades on, the problems remain depressingly similar." On a recent visit to Maryhill, he observed how little had changed for the better and "the still jarring contrast between the low living standards and low expectations" of the disadvantaged in comparison to the more affluent and middle class.

Cable in the 1970s got to know a young student radical in Edinburgh, Gordon Brown, and contributed to his book Red Paper on Scotland on the subject of Glasgow. His essay addresses what he today views as "the extraordinarily entrenched multi-dimensional poverty" of the city.

Even then, Cable could perceive some broad trends that would influence Glasgow and the country in the future. Scotland was shifting away from the West towards the East, aided by changes in industry and the discovery of oil. The Left had no real positive agenda and instead could be seen as "defensive".

This opened up all sorts of possibilities. Looking forward to the 1980s, Cable conceded that "Scotland could, in all probability, expect to be more prosperous as an independent country".

Cable's account tells us the prevalence of many of the same problems through the ages. This can be seen as "the two Glasgows": of a city of great wealth, status and culture sitting alongside one of poverty, dislocation and grimness. Yet, in the most disadvantaged parts of the city, a host of activities, campaigns and initiatives are given form and support by predominantly female activists. With the retreat of political parties, trade unions and churches, they support a self-organising, self-sustaining mosaic of groups that keep places going and offer a sense of hope and purpose.

This reflects the burgeoning gender divide in the city, which has grown dramatically in recent decades. In many of these areas where women have navigated and negotiated in difficult circumstances, one of the questions people ask is "Where are the men?" Many of the men, not all, have become resigned to being part of the "walking wounded", giving up on the prospect of full-time work and crime or drugs, or just general despondency.

This points to the two very different Glasgow traditions. One was institutional and about macro-change: always looking for "big bang" solutions to problems, whether it was slum clearance or the current Housing Stock Transfer. The other was more organic, local and about micro-change, and it found voice in the Independent Labour Party in the 1920s and 1930s. Its modern version is found in the community-activist, predominately female-led view of the city.

It would seem we have tried the "big bang" masculinised, modernist vision of the city until it has exhausted itself. Perhaps some of the answers were there all along in the alternative vision.