A guide to Glasgow East
Fraser Nelson 2:50pmThat wee film I presented about Glasgow East – just over 3 minutes long - is now up on YouTube (you can watch it after the jump), It’s based on my political column from a couple of weeks ago and was broadcast last Friday and commissioned by Robbie Gibb, editor of the BBC’s Daily Politics. The BBC team assembled a powerful collection of images, which tell their own story (just as well, as the narration is a bit dodgy). Here it is with my wee guide beneath.
The YouTube film doesn’t show the Politics Show debate afterwards. Click here – for the BBC iPlayer version – for that. Zoe Williams, a Guardian columnist, suggests I just made up the idea that children aspire to get on to incapacity benefit. My claim obviously sounds ridiculous to her. She should consider this: in Glasgow East as a whole (including the posh bits) a scandalous total of 39% of children grow up in workless households – twice the national average (itself the highest in Europe). In Parkhead North it’s 55%, in Easterhouse West it’s 60%. If these kids grow up only ever seeing worklessness – and a welfare hierarchy where those on IB are at the top – is it so surprising they aspire to do the same?1) Grey skies in the intro (0’40) – We shot this scene at the end, a race against the rain. We had to beg to get into a disused flat right at the top, which allowed the panoramic filming – and the chance to share a lift with heroin addicts. As I said in the blog I wrote the day we filmed, the guy who looked after the high rise estate said he was pleased we filmed the area in such grim weather because that, to him, epitomises Glasgow East life. Sunshine, he says, is deceptive because it makes the place look nice.2) Smoking woman (1’20) The grimness is powerfully captured by this picture of a woman having a cuppa in the high rise and flinging her fag down below. Just imagine if this was the high point of your day.
3) My dad’s old council house (1’30). It’s still standing, albeit done up, and is right in the middle of the constituency. It is a lovely house, built by the council in the 1930s out of sheet metal and bricked over a few years ago. It was a marker of how the welfare state could have been. It wasn’t until the 1960s that big government came along and decanted entire communities into disgusting high rises. The pre-war welfare state certainly delivered for my father’s family. Like almost all of his (eight) siblings, my dad left school aged 15 to work and bring in money for the family (that was ‘welfare’ in those days). He was a milkman, then he joined the Post Office so he got to know the area very well. He utterly rejects the idea that Glasgow East was then the type of deprivation hellhole it is now. It has taken the post-war welfare state, and billions of pounds, to create this kind of poverty.
4) Decent New Houses (1 min 50) – Again, as you can see, there are well-to-do areas. These new houses are about one minute from the M8 motorway, and I suspect used as commuter boltholes. Some of the new housing here could be unhesitatingly described as beautiful. But this is not about the architecture – you can build new houses, but as I say (2’02) the problem is not the housing, but the lives of the people inside them. A decade ago, one of my cousins was told about how they are doing up Easterhouse. “But they’re not doing up the people,” she said. It sounded cruel to me at the time, but she made a better point than I was then capable of realising. The more you study poverty the more you realise that behavioural patterns – not cash – is the key. This is what David Cameron was saying in his speech in St Jude’s church last week. I would also argue that the state is paving a road to poverty here, and we should not be surprised if people follow this path. We offer welfare dependency as a lifestyle choice, and we taxing low-paid work so much that working can be seen as the dumb option. Yes, people are free to break out of this path - but the fact that the path to poverty is there in the first place is a scandal which the Tories will have to change.
5) Smashed Vodka Bottle – 2’21. This was in a park between the houses, where children were playing. The kids learn to step over this kind of detritus, but it struck me that clearing this junk is a prime candidate for the “work for dole” scheme that James Purnell will be talking about in his Green Paper on Monday.
6) Dead rat – 2’23. This was behind a gate, just outside one of the houses there, beside a child’s shoe. Again, the kids know better than to go anywhere near this.
7) Postman – 2.40. I wish I had a photograph of this image, as it sums up the despair perfectly. When we drove past this estate (about 2 minutes from the motorway exit) we almost went away thinking it was condemned. Windows boarded up, junk outside it. But the postman shows that people are carrying on their lives inside this welfare hellhole. You could see a middle-aged couple carrying up shopping and children, playing in these doorways.. Imagine growing up here. As I say in the film, the odds stacked against those children growing up here are heartbreakingly high.
8) The Girl 2.53. Notice how the door number of the house this girl is walking into – 3 – is sprayed in graffiti on the wall. We spoke to this girl and her twin brother afterwards (too young to use for broadcast), and you couldn’t hope to meet nicer kids. Their only complaint about the area was that it is boring, nothing to do. Yet just ten minutes away is this spanking new arts centre, offering bellydancing lessons – but this has no appeal. The guy in the council house we met told me that it’s boredom that leads them to drugs: “They sign on, have nothing in their life, and think that the man with the drugs may have the answer”.
9) Building site – 3.08. New houses are being built directly opposite that revolting boarded-up housing estate. I’m sure it cost a bomb – and again, it seemed to me an example of the waste of money. Those houses we filmed were due to be knocked down (or so the twins told me) but is there anything structurally wrong with them? The twins said people moved away because their windows kept being smashed – and judging by the fortification around the windowless pub around the corner, it’s a real issue in this estate. But it is not one that can be overcome by writing an even bigger cheque, for another housing estate.10) Motorway – 3.30. I wanted to film here because the M8 (which dissects the constituency) has always, to me, been an allegory for the prosperity (and the rest of the country) bypassing the east of Glasgow. I don’t know how many times I’ve made that journey, shuddering at the sign for ‘Easterhouse’, and counting my blessings that I avoided being one of its residents. Of course, you can play a hundred ‘what if’ games. Thousands grow up in Glasgow East just fine. Lone parents bring up hard-working, law-abiding children in the grimmest parts of Easterhouse against these odds. But it is a battle to do so. In this rich country of ours, it should not be.
It’s a real shame that so many on the left don’t study poverty hard enough to be able to imagine these scenarios. It should be the left that dragged Brown to a radical welfare reform agenda and said “worklessness is an evil – tackle it, don’t just shift it to a different statistical column”. But they were so transfixed by government’s ability to take money from the rich and give it to the poor that they saw it all as a matter of cash transfer. By this measure, Glasgow East is a success because plenty money is being transferred from rich to the poor. But as I say in the film, this cash has just paid people to sit out the economic boom.
The last Conservative government, I should add, did much damage by moving people on to incapacity benefit when the industrial jobs went. Thatcher thought it was a one-off policy, but instead the people written off taught their children how to do the same and the system was perpetuated. So while Glasgow East bears the scars or deindustrialisation, it shouldn’t have - Labour should have used the boom years to fight poverty here, not perpetuate it.
Finally David Cairns, the Scotland Office minister, claims after my film that unemployment halved in ten years. The data literally doesn’t exist for this new constituency to substantiate his claim. And it’s not the 2,700 officially “unemployed” that’s the problem – it’s the 16,800 (DWP breakdown here) on various kinds of out-of-work benefit that is the key. He says every school here is rated excellent. That’s as may be, but most pupils (51%) still leave these “excellent” schools without the basic qualifications (five GCSE passes). He also says things were as bad in East Glasgow fifty and even a hundred years ago. Utter nonsense, as anyone who lived there fifty years ago will tell him. The phrase I heard there - “when the drugs came” – refers to a step change about 25 years ago.
This is a new sort of poverty: a very expensive kind, the kind that emerges if the government gives up on entire areas. As long as these people have no chance of crossing Gordon Brown’s arbitrary poverty threshold – 60% of median income – they are no use to him. By using cheap immigrant labour to keep the economy going, he was able to avoid confronting this problem. The boom years were his chance to end welfare dependency. Instead, he chose a path of statistics manipulation. He chose to turn the other way – and the welfare ghettos of Glasgow East are the result. Heroic work is done by charities who turn around lives in Glasgow East, and another film could be done (or article written) showing this optimistic side of things. But there are literally millions in Britain who live in the grim conditions that I outline, for whom life is bad and getting worse. Such people are very, very easy to ignore. The purpose of this wee film (and in my blogging endlessly about it) is to use the by-election to look at this dark side of our country.
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Comments
Ray
July 19th, 2008 5:04pmRightly or wrongly, the Conservatives under Margaret Thatcher dreamed up Incapacity Benefit as a way of heading off the revolution that would have ensued had three million unemployed been totally cast to the wind. In that sense, it was a purely political expedient.
However, with a firm mandate and a huge parliamentary majority to fortify its traditional identification as the 'party of the working class', New Labour had no excuse for fudging welfare reform at a time when the economy was booming and the jobs were there for the taking.
Now that the economy has finally turned and the jobs have all been taken by Poles and Lithuanians, history will judge Gordon Brown harshly (and rightly so) for this monumental act of pusillanimity.
Silent Hunter
July 19th, 2008 5:38pmSo are people who live 'outside' Glasgow East coming into the area just to dump their rubbish there are they?
No....of course not!
It's the people who actually live there that crap on their very own doorstep.
Just because you're poor does not mean that you can't look after your own neighbourhood.
But if your feckless; then yes, you will end up living in your own filth and have the nerve to turn around and blame anybody but yourself for the mess that you create.
And what do you think would happen if you could take these people out of Glasgow East and put them in Bearsden for a year.
I would put money on it that you would find that Bearsden would resemble a warzone with burnt out cars, litter everywhere, graffiti, drugs, crime etc, etc.
In short; everything that currently makes these sink estates what they are.
It's not the 'place'......it's the underclass that inhabit it.
We should save our pity for the poor OAP's and poor but working families who have no choice but to live there with these feckless morons.
Hugh
July 19th, 2008 6:45pmBlair tasked Frank Field and Harriet Harman to lead on the Welfare agenda in 1997 I understand, but their job was made imposssible by Brown who hijacked Blair's agenda (Bower).
Presumably therefore we can blame him directly and personally for Labour's failure in this area.
David McEwan Hill
July 19th, 2008 8:58pmThatcher's deindustrialisation of this area presumably had nothing to do with all this? When you take work away from this kind of area the results are inevitable as areas of Glasgow East (which are replicated in many parts of the North of the UK)show.
I do not entertain any rosy eyed vision of most people and recognise the absolute capacity of most members of the human race to reduce themselves to squalor if they are not absorbed into a disciplined and asperational framework. So lets have less of the self-righteous Tory cant from Fraser. What is wrong with Glasgow East is as much a product of the Tories' years in government as it is a failure of this pathetic Labour government.
By the way I was campaigning in the constituency today. There are many very nice parts of it.
However I was in the Bailleston Road /Shettlston Road part of it - the main thoroughfares across the constituency - surrounded by hundreds of SNP activists everywhere I went and in five hours I did not see even one Labour activist. They are dead in the water and if they win this one it will be only because of custom and the Scottish media. If they lose the Labour citadel in Scotland is destroyed.
TrevorH
July 19th, 2008 9:29pmI may be wrong but was not Harman Brown's proxy to ensure that Fields reforms never saw the light of day?
In any event all those who ask, 'where did it all go wrong' can probably date the end of the whole new labour experiment, the end of any likely benefit from this labour government, to the resignation of Field. It exposed Browns methods, his agenda and Blairs weakness and lack of vision.
Pete, Scotland
July 19th, 2008 9:43pmFraser, as a contractor regularly visiting Glasgow East I wholeheartedly support your analysis.
Thatcher may have created the problem through de-industrialisation, but Labour have been only too happy to feast on the carcus.
As somebody that took part in the many demonstrations against the last Tory Government I can, on reflection, say that I have come to the conclusion that the poverty in Glasgow East is more a creation of Labour than of the Tories.
Unfortunately, as the education system in this area is so poor, few will be well enough read to understand this.
Keep up the good reporting.
JR
July 19th, 2008 9:44pmHugh - forget the past. Everyone has thought the unthinkable in the last two years don't worry. We are everything sadly.
Austin Barry
July 20th, 2008 12:44amThe problem, and it isn't confined to Glasgow East,is that until relatively recently, indeed throughout history, the working class contained intelligent people, like Fraser's dad, who were marooned at the bottom of the food chain because of a lack of access to a decent education. This immobility of the intelligent provided an element of stability, self-respect and virtue to the working class. The unintended consequence of the post-1945 education reforms was that while the intelligent, through grammar schools, were able to migrate, physically as well as intellectually, in a kind of "bright flight" to middle-class suburbia it left a residue of the dim, feckless and inert consigned forever to sink estates, bad schools and to fag-smoking, chip-swallowing, welfare-collecting, track-suited oblivion. Fraser's politically incorrect cousin stated precisely why the problem is insoluble.
Alf Tupper
July 20th, 2008 7:06amLate catching this Fraser but great article, I'm sure you don't need my urging to keep on it. Not nearly enough light shone on this massive part of our nation.
This is the article that Zoe Williams would like to get round to sometime when there might be like a Scottishey/ working class indolencey type thing going on.
Commondog
July 20th, 2008 7:16amSilent Hunter.
Are you really that confident that the people who live in this area - and the many like it - are undeserving of any sympathy or help?
Aside from any bleeding heart appeal, it's my tax money that pays for their benefits and so I'd rather we could find a way for them to get working.
Wouldn't that make more sense than writing them off with such sweeping condemnation?
Silent Hunter
July 20th, 2008 1:41pmCommondog:
The word I used was...Feckless.
Did you not read my final paragraph? They are the people who deserve our sympathy and our help.
Unfortunately they are the ones least likely to get it as they are usually last in the line for benefits which are hoovered up by the 'feckless' who have no intention of ever working for a living and see no reason to when they can rely on unending state handouts.
As I said............it's a 'lifestyle statement' of choice rather than necessity for the feckless people who inhabit these estates and who are responsible for the crime and filth which the deserving poor & elderly also have to put up with.
Do you really want to champion their cause?
Bleeding heart liberal you say?
Perhaps said with a hint of irony.
Hysteria
July 20th, 2008 3:53pmHow to deal with the "feckless"? - I wonder if it is time for something akin to Roosevelts Civilian Conservation Corp? This gave men of working age some discipline and structure and also gave something back to the nation in the form of the many wonderful parks and other civic amenites that remain an example to us all. Maybe Keynsian, but if we are going to throw money at the problem in the form of benefits (plus health care, wasted education, increased crime etc) then we may as well get something concrete back
Matt Wright
July 20th, 2008 10:41pmThere are some real issues that have to be faced upto here with faults on all sides. However it is also too easy for some to just blame Thatcher. De-industrialisation occured across most of the developed Western world. In a strange way when people go on blaming others for problems they are never able to move on to the next stage. Many places adapted and changed but some haven't. I do believe that Labour have really let places like this down. Welfarism is a key element in the failure.
David McEwan Hill
July 20th, 2008 11:26pmLloyd Georgre put his finger on it many years agao. He pointed out that it was cheaper to subsidise men in work than to subsidise them out of work and it was also better for their morale, behaviour and society in general.
It is a balnce that progressive governments must seek to achieve and it must be real productive work not the brown economy of paper pushers successive governments and local authorities have employed to massage unemployment figures.
But Mrs Thatcher, confusing Tory prejudices with sensible policies, could never understand any of these moderately subtle political realities.
Rob
July 21st, 2008 4:32amI don't see how having a fag and a cuppa on a high rise is grim.
Verity
July 21st, 2008 2:44pmI know what Glasgow East needs to become inspired to save itself! A visit from Obama! He's looking for a platform since Angela Merkel said "no" to the Brandenberg Gate. He will introduce change you can believe in! In other words, he will automate the tills at the off-license.
Jack
July 22nd, 2008 2:44pmRob,
I think you have to live there and see it first hand to get it. The context of that woman and many like her is that she probably hasn't worked in 20 years since the factories closed. Her face is putrid from excessive alcohol and cigarette consumption. She's actually only in her late forties but looks like she's in her sixties and is no doubt a grandmother of at least two. Her daughter - with the two grandchildren - doesn't work either and never has. The father(s) of the grandchildren probably ply a lonely trade at the Barras market, if they can, maybe peddle a few stolen goods but generally just take their money from the dole office and don't give as much of it to the children as they need to. they smoke round the children too and their chances of employment are less than the Poles and the Lithuanians because their standard of written and spoken English is worse than most of the immigrants to the area. One of them was brilliant at football when he was a kid, but the lure of drugs and booze and the pressure of gang life consumed him in his early teens. The woman on the high rise is looking out over all of this and relfecting on what her now dead father - who did his national service and worked hard as a low-grade civil servant, providing for his family all his life, would have thought of it all. He would have been ashamed. As would any of the generation of butchers, shopowners, bakers, who all owned their own businesses on Duke St or Ally Parade and were the cornerstone of the community. (I'm only specualting of course)
I used to live in this constituency. It's like a zoo at nights; a circus sideshow during the day and any sense of community and civic responsibility has evaporated. It IS grim.
T.M.O.
July 23rd, 2008 5:32pmIt may seem a logical assumption to make but the educational system in East Glasgow is quite good. The school facilities are same as anywhere in Glasgow and indeed better than in Renfrewshire. The teachers in my experience are capable and motivated. The children have every oppurtunity open to them.
I can tell you, as a teacher, that I remember that students' social skills, discipline and ambitions in this part of Glasgow were abysmally low. Parents were unhelpful too.
The only way that I can imagine a resolution coming about is by taking away their so-called benefits and learn the value of a hard day's work. No-one benefits from their current indolence.