A politician, a cocaine dealer, blackmail, links to organised crime and the mysterious death of a teenage boy: it is hard to think of more potent ingredients for a political scandal. Had it happened in Paris, the story would be all over the English press. But this scandal took place in Glasgow — so the London papers are not interested. After devolution, Scotland is fast becoming a foreign land about which the English know little and care less.
The downfall of Steven Purcell, leader of Glasgow City Council, is not just a tale of one man’s collapse, but a grim allegory for the tragedy of devolution. Purcell was, until last week, the man to watch in Scottish politics. Many regarded him as the politician who could win back the Scottish parliament for Labour. His rise was seen as an indication that the tawdry corruption that had dogged Scottish municipal politics was on the wane.
In the past week, though, Purcell has been unmasked as a cocaine addict. He was visited at his offices last year by the Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency. There are concerns that his drug habit made him vulnerable to blackmail by the city’s crime bosses. In a murky twist, a teenage boy reported to be a close friend of Purcell collapsed and died in a street close to the ex-councillor’s former office on Friday.
The implosion of Purcell’s career has shown how unreformed Scottish politics remains. Instead of introducing a new crop of politicians, devolution has simply given limousines and ministerial portfolios to the same old politicians from the town hall (plus a few C-listers from Westminster). Some MSPs have been arrested for drunkenly setting fire to hotel curtains. Henry McLeish, a former First Minister, resigned in an expenses scandal. ‘Scottish solutions for Scottish problems’, the oft-repeated slogan of devolution, rings hollow. The problems of Scotland, and of Glasgow in particular, lie hideously unredressed.
The burning issue in Scotland — the world-class poverty in its welfare ghettos — has been ignored by the new politicians just as it was by the old. Researchers come from all over the world to study the urban poverty in Glasgow — but in Scotland, and Britain, it has lost its ability to shock. The annual death toll from drugs has almost doubled since devolution, to over 200 a year. Yet Scotland’s forgotten estates only make the news through headline-grabbing tragedies, such as this week’s story of three Kurdish asylum seekers who jumped from a Glasgow tower block to their deaths.
Eleven years after devolution, it is clear that it was the wrong reform for Scotland — and for Wales, with its watered-down version of a parliament. That voters are being failed by politicians in Cardiff and Edinburgh rather than in London is little consolation. Devolution has merely meant the transfer of power from one set of politicians to another.
But more tragic still is how distant devolution has made Scotland seem. Once Labour leaves power, the new British government will probably have just one MP north of Hadrian’s wall. So Alex Salmond will not need a referendum to achieve Scotland’s independence. He can just capitalise on Westminster ignorance, and slowly assume powers for his centralising bureaucracy in Edinburgh. This, it seems, is how the union will end: not as a result of Scottish agitation but of English indifference.
Comments