My wee film about Glasgow East will be shown on BBC Daily Politics today. I’ve blogged plenty about this, but if CoffeeHousers will indulge me here’s my take on the debate so far. There has been some controversy about the claim that life expectancy there is worse than the Gaza Strip; part of this is down to the left’s inability to comprehend the extent of the poverty their policies have nurtured there. But the Gaza comparison is actually a gross understatement.
Male life expectancy for the whole of Glasgow, including its lush suburbs, averages 70.7 years – worse than Gaza’s 71.01 years. In East Glasgow, it goes right down to 53.9 years in the Calton ward (see here for a full rundown). It is tragic comic to see Labour taking such a philosophical attitude to the scandalous deprivation in Glasgow East during this election campaign as if they were talking about the weather. “Oh, its heartbreaking and very complex” they say and use phrases like “multiple deprivation” to make it sound so complicated that government cant do anything about it. What’s happened is that Labour’s remedy to poverty – more money – has made the problem worse. And these Labour MPs can’t begin to understand why.
I see three parts to this problem.
Moral long-sightedness This is a phrase from Rabbi Lionel Blue. He means the ability of people to see (and get worked up) about problems thousands of miles away or hundreds of years away (global warming) but be blind to poverty on our own doorstep. Brown, for example, literally pledges to educate every kid in the world – but seems not so worried about the tens of thousands of British children who leave schools unable to read or write properly. So government in Britain is now worrying about schools in Africa, while charities are worrying about schooling the British poor. I was at lunch last week at Civitas which runs 14 supplementary schools, teaching English ten-year-olds how to read in out-of-hours classes. Labour will not recognise this problem, because it means they must accept these kids are failed by its appalling state education. It’s a 21st century equivalent to Ragged Schools – just as in Dickensian days, schools to educate the poor depend on charitable donations. And as in Dickensian days, it’s a cause well worth donating to.
“There are no votes in the poor”. This is a lesser-known quote from Jo Moore, the ex-Labour special adviser famous for saying that 9/11 was a good day to bury bad news. But she’s right: the most deprived parts of Britain are safe Labour seats – today’s equivalent of rotten boroughs. You don’t mean a thing if your seat is not a swing, so people in places like Glasgow East are never canvassed. The views of swing seat voters, however, are treated as utmost priorities in Westminster. This is a huge drawback to our system. Those in sink estates are regarded as being devoid of political capital for any mainstream party. The welfare ghettos are, for Westminster, terra incognita.
Dearth of data. A problem must be recognised to be solved, and the full data in these housing estates is very difficult to get hold of. The House of Commons Library, for example, has records of the monthly unemployment figures but not the data for incapacity benefit, lone parents etc so even the MPs can stay happily ignorant of what’s going on in their own doorstep. Urban British poverty, such as in Glasgow East, takes a mosaic nature: pockets of deprivation next to bubbles of prosperity. One can only recognise the problem by zeroing in on the deprivation, whereas the UK system merges both together obscuring the problem. And if we don’t measure poverty properly, we won’t know how bad things are.
The “Gaza” figure was one which yours truly first unearthed after nine months of wading through statistics when I was at The Scotsman newspaper (they’ve taken it offline now, but a copy of the story is here). I tried to adjust for the mosaic effect I describe above, and looked at the bottom 10% of neighbourhoods together. I called this “Third Scotland” as the life expectancy was closer to the third world than of the top 10% which I called “Prime Scotland.” If it were a country, Prime Scotland would have the highest life expectancy in the world.
When I compiled the figures, I was found all the places I had lived in – Dollar, Nairn, Elgin, Hillhead, Stockbridge – were part of Prime Scotland. As were the places I liked to visit: Dunkeld, Ullapool etc. I thought I had travelled a lot in my home country, but the truth was I hadn’t travelled at all. I’d just shuttled between these geographically disparate parts of the country which were bubbles of prosperity. What I called “Scotland” was but a tiny fraction of the country. I also noticed that sales of The Scotsman were disproportionately in Prime Scotland.
This solved a mystery for me. When you look at Scotland on any statistical dataset, it is one big horror story. Welfarism, health deprivation, drugs, drink – there are reams of data about what a socioeconomic nightmare the country is. When I was writing about this as a journalist, it seemed utterly alien to the country I had grown up in and (I thought) travelled well in. My “Prime Scotland” and “Third Scotland” dataset explained it. I had only experienced the best.
And no wonder those lucky enough to live in Prime Scotland angrily reject all the comparisons to the Gaza Strip and the evidence of deprivation. For them, Scotland is indeed the best small country in the world. Property is cheap and the standard of living is excellent – but it’s all as far away from Third Scotland as Britain is from Bulgaria.
Finally (and then, I promise, I’ll shut up) it is so easy to ignore Third Scotland – and Third Britain, which I’m sure also exists – because there is such little social interaction between this and Prime Scotland/Prime Britain. Glasgow is constructed so you can zip past the grim parts. I finish my BBC film on the motorway which dissects Glasgow East and can in one hour take you from Edinburgh New Town to Glasgow’s West End. You can look at the high rises and shudder as you belt towards Byres Road, but that’s the closest you get to it. That motorway, I’ve always thought, is an allegory for both economic prosperity which has bypassed the constituency – and Labour’s policymakers who will only ever look at it from a distance.
Prime and Third Scotland are half a mile apart in some places, but the two nations don’t interact. Somehow along the way, we – as a country – learned to look the other way: to worry about climate change, but not the poverty just a few miles down the road. To think that the taxes Labour charge somehow promotes a more cohesive society, when in fact it’s pouring petrol on the flames. State handouts may have been the cure to post-war poverty, but it’s the cause of 21st century poverty as we see in Glasgow East.
My “Third Scotland” article for The Scotsman came out on 4 January 2006, it was the first time that postcode expectancy data had been published. Labour in Scotland rebutted it by speaking about all the money going in to these sink estates. But I was surprised and delighted to see a Westminster politician seize on my article and use it as the basis for a major speech a fortnight later. That was David Cameron – his speech is here. The issue then faded, until the Glasgow East by-election was called. Aside from the prospect of the SNP winning, the by-election has at least shone a spotlight what I believe to be, by some margin, the most urgent and neglected problem in Britain today.
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