Glasgow by-election I

The silence of the poor

After the murder of a young asylum seeker in the Glasgow north-east constituency eight years ago, I chaired a public meeting in the city. The hall was packed, the mood intense. What could be done to prevent this happening again? Was a creative response possible? As a result of this meeting, a programme came into being to help asylum seekers assimilate into the community.
     In 2001 Glasgow was unfamiliar with asylum seekers. Suddenly, without warning, there were rather a lot of them about. Billy Connolly had not advised the natives, through self-deprecating humour, how to react good-naturedly, nor indeed had anyone advised the natives, least of all their own local authority, so there was confusion and envy at the spectacle of fridges and washing machines arriving at the front doors of the newcomers. The indigenous population felt unhappy, neglected, discriminated against. It was in this resentful atmosphere that the Kurd was stabbed to death.
     Glasgow City Council appointed a mediator to 'assist in reducing tensions in Sighthill'. Sighthill once existed not as a bad name for ethnic relations, but as a community of skilled workers in the Victorian age of railways. There were, for example, the famous Sighthill Shunters. They were more than shunters. They were debaters; they talked about everything under heaven and earth, in the same way as their blood brothers, the railwaymen on the station platform in rural Aberdeenshire, at Inveramsay. Talk; so much fierce talk. The philosophers say that talk is good. It was good for Sighthill. It was a working-class phenomenon. Decades later, in the post-war era into which I was born, they were still talking. But then it stopped. People started watching instead. The age of voyeurism began. It was not good for Sighthill, any more than the loss of its main industry had been good. No one built railway engines any more. No one shunted. No one talked. There was a comprehensive silence. There is silence still. Not the deeply meditative silence we are observing today, but an apathetic, defeated silence.
     Before long we had a mediator reducing tensions. Quite a beat. But the mediation didn't last long. There was no 'sustainability' behind the appointment, not that we had invented the word sustainability. Mediation perished as an idea, or as an item on the annual budget, or as a PR stunt, or as all three. Instead we had someone called David Aaronovitch lecturing the poor of Glasgow north-east.
     David Aaronovitch was – is? I know not – a commentator with the Independent newspaper. He wrote a piece of such bile that it retains an internet half-life. The people of Sighthill, who were no longer shunters but mostly abject victims surplus to productive requirements, suddenly finding themselves in the wrong place in the wrong century, were categorised as living in sink estates in a 'downward spiral' – it is always downward, this spiral – of 'poverty, ignorance and hopelessness'. Mr Aaronovitch himself wrote with the authority of someone living in north London. He said that he would rather live with 1,200 asylum seekers than with 1,200 natives of Sighthill. That was his conclusion, such as it was. He did not say whether he had gone to Sighthill to sample the 1,200 natives – or indeed the 1,200 asylum seekers – before arriving at this opinion or whether it was simply a north London theory, as sound as any other.
     By the 1,200 natives he meant white people, in so far as there are people of that colour; perhaps it is more a form of cultural shorthand. In 1964, the year Harold Wilson came to power with his first government, ushering in the 'white heat of the technological revolution' – yes, that had to be white too – the redundant shunters were being shunted into new flats, built by Crudens Ltd, on a site on which the St Rollox Chemical Works, once the largest chemical manufacturers in the world, had dumped their waste. It was known locally as the Soda Waste. It is these flats in Fountainwell Road, where it feels unlikely that a fountain ever welled, which are now being demolished before the 50th anniversary of their appearance. Two blocks were blown up last year at 2 in the morning. It would have been heard in the graveyard opposite, where the leaders of the 1820 insurrection are buried. More controlled explosions are due. Meanwhile, as we reported yesterday, a Korean war veteran, Mr Daly, lives with his wife in conditions almost beyond belief.
     How brutally short is the span of things. My old school at Denny – it too has gone the way of all rubble. It seems no time at all since I turned up on the first day of the new building or, somewhat later, presented the prizes and claimed in my speech that they had got the wrong Roy. People laughed politely. The school orchestra played. All seemed fixed. Nothing was. But Denny is a model of permanence compared to Sighthill, which passes from gleaming engines to soda waste to state benefits within a few generations. In the streets of Glasgow north-east, young women carrying supermarket bags wear burkas obscuring their faces, leaving only slits for eyes which survey a featureless wasteland.
     It would not be at all surprising if the fascists saved their deposit in Glasgow tomorrow night. If that evil comes to pass, the recent history of the constituency should tell us why.

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