That 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.
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. 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?
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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