Has Glasgow East influenced the postponed 2p increase in fuel duty, as David Cameron implied today? I doubt it, for a depressing reason. The place is so poor that most households in that constituency – 59% to be precise – simply don’t have access to a car (let alone own one). For the record, here are the car ownership figures for some of the estates in Glasgow East (from the 2001 census). In Parkhead North, 77.2% have no car. In Easterhouse it’s 71%. In Banlanark, 71%. In Bridgeton, 64%. I can understand why, in Westminster, they may have a vision of the motorists of Glasgow East punching the air in response to today’s news. But there is another area of government policy that matters more to the electors of Glasgow East.
If the government had Glasgow East in mind it wouldn’t let James Purnell announce his “tough love” welfare reform package on Monday. Forget what you hear about unemployment being just 2,270 or 6.7%. It’s a true figure, as the House of Commons monthly report shows (pdf), but, as I say in my political column tomorrow, it obscures the fact that there are staggering total of 16,800 welfare-depdendent people amongst the working age population in Glasgow East (DWP breakdown here). The last thing they want to know is that the Labour government is going to force them into a work-for-dole scheme, where they’ll be given a brush and told to get sweeping.
From the amount of broken glass I saw on the estates in Glasgow East on my visit there last week, Purnell’s plan (based, like the Tories’ plan, on the Freud Report) will be much needed. Perhaps the government hasn’t connected Purnell’s Green Paper on welfare with the by-election. Or, maybe it is being principled. Either way, it is welfare reform – not petrol costs – which make the bigger impact in the wretched communities of these estates. And welfare reform is what Glasgow East needs more than anything else.
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