Kenneth
Roy's
Week

Hell-holes and other illusions

Of course I was slightly unnerved; who wouldn't be? The night before I arrived in the constituency, a young man, scarcely more than a boy, had been stabbed to death by a gang a few hundred yards from where I was staying. His hysterical sister insisted that this must be the last such murder, but it wasn't: another followed almost immediately. With his dying breath, the latest victim called for his mum. How touching; except that when the papers carried a picture of the victim, he was brandishing a ferocious knife. All week the atmosphere was edgy...the flowers of remembrance, the Bebo tributes, the depressing normality of life – and death – in this appalling neighbourhood.
     Glasgow East? Not at all. This was London in the first week of July 2008.
     'If you seek Labour's monument, look at this hell-hole...' writes Simon Heffer in the Daily Telegraph on Wednesday.
     To which hell-hole does he allude? The scary Stockwell Park Estate, not far from the Palace of Varieties at Westminster? The streets of Islington early on a Sunday morning? No, this is Mr Heffer's way of introducing his readers to the horrors of Shettleston.
     Mr Heffer is a journalist who complains of the drinking habits of the non-working-class, claiming that the availability of 24-hour boozing is a greater cause of premature death in the east end of Glasgow than deep-fried Mars bars or tobacco. I have no knowledge of Mr Heffer's own habits – he seems all too sober – but he belongs to a newspaper once notorious for its drinking culture; Daily Telegraph hacks used to pride themselves on doing as little as possible, spending the long afternoons in Fleet Street watering holes. To borrow a striking phrase from one of Mr Heffer's colleagues, young Fraser Nelson of The Spectator, it was 'an invisible benighted country of its own'. He too is referring to Glasgow East, but until recently the metaphor would have applied more neatly to the media outfit which employs him. The Telegraph group was virtually bankrupted by the practices of its workforce and was eventually rescued by a Canadian who is now serving six and a half years in a Florida prison.
     Whatever the much-examined, much-deplored human weaknesses of the east end, you can be sure that no one who lives there has ever been convicted of massive corporate fraud. The traditional lot of the people of industrial Glasgow was back-breaking, soul-destroying, life-shortening physical labour as the ill-paid foot soldiers of rapacious capitalism – not a form of employment with which the average metropolitan journalist is familiar. It was a slave trade on our own doorstep, and the state bears a heavy responsibility for its calamitous aftermath, the post-industrial malaise which continues to afflict the east end. If you expect a people bred in the bone of heavy industry to convert easily to the new service-based economy of waiters and shop assistants, IT whizzkids and call centre operatives, you must also expect the disaffected youth of Stockwell Park to attend Sunday School and you must further expect that right-wing hacks will drop the high moral tone which so ill becomes them. None of this is going to happen. We are who we are and all the 2,823 laws passed by Gordon Brown in his first year as Prime Minister are unlikely to change us much.
     As for life expectancy, most of my colleagues in journalism fell off the perch in their forties or fifties. Even Shettleston Man does rather better than that.

[click here] for Kenneth Roy's report from Glasgow East

[click here] for Islay McLeod's photo feature from Glasgow East