A conspiracy of silence?

By Professor Jim Gallagher.This article first appeared in the spring 2014 edition of the RSGS's magazine, The Geographer.

The thing most ignored in the present Scottish independence debate is the thing which is most likely to happen after it. There is something of a conspiracy of silence about the new tax powers which will come to the Scottish Parliament as a result of the Scotland Act 2012. In fact, they represent a substantial addition to the powers of the Scottish Parliament, all the more remarkable in a state with such a tradition of fiscal centralisation as the United Kingdom.

When the Scottish Parliament was created in 1999, it built upon the foundation of administrative devolution which had grown up over the previous century or more. Most of the domestic functions of government in Scotland were decentralised, to a territorial Secretary of State. This in its turn was built on the preservation of the separate Scottish legal system, educational system, and church since the Act of Union in 1707.

The Scottish Office that administered the services had an immensely wide range of responsibilities: health, education, justice, transport, economic development, agriculture, and many others. Indeed, virtually the same range of responsibilities as the Scottish Parliament has today. But it was, in the jargon, a spending department of government: it disbursed monies or spent them directly, and was funded by UK taxation collected by the Treasury. The only exceptions were local taxes such as council tax and nondomestic rates.

In consequence, the Parliament created in 1999 was lopsided. It had immensely wide spending responsibilities – as wide as those in any federal state – but only vestigial taxing responsibilities. The UK is internationally unusual in that virtually all taxes are collected and gathered centrally by the Treasury. Most other countries, and certainly federal countries, have some decentralised taxation.

Against this background and in response to the election of an SNP minority government in 2007, the UK Labour Government, supported by a majority of members of the Scottish Parliament, decided to set up the Calman Commission, to review the powers of the Parliament and in particular its fiscal accountability. The analysis was thorough, setting out how the Scottish Parliament fitted into the wider UK union, and how it could be made more fiscally accountable by tax decentralisation.

The essential recommendation was that a proportion (about one third) of the Scottish Parliament’s
budget should be funded by taxes it levied itself, rather than by transfers from the UK Exchequer. A number of smaller taxes, such as stamp duty land tax, were recommended for wholesale devolution. But the main recommendation was that income tax – one of the three biggest taxes, and the most perceptible – should become a shared tax, levied on the same tax base by both the Westminster and Holyrood parliaments.

As a result, the rate of UK income tax applying in Scotland would be reduced by 10p in the pound, and the grant to the Scottish Parliament from Westminster reduced by a commensurate amount. The Scottish Parliament could then choose an income tax rate of its own, and would receive the resultant revenue. So the Parliament would be required to make a tax decision, and would control the total of its budget by setting a higher or lower rate.

These recommendations were accepted by all the main UK parties, and despite opposing it until the last moment, the SNP majority administration elected in 2011 eventually consented, and the scheme was enacted as the Scotland Act 2012. The legislation will be put into effect in 2016, so that the Scottish Parliament elected then (assuming Scotland has decided against independence) will have substantial income tax powers.

Three things are remarkable about this. First, the UK is probably the most fiscally centralised state in the Western world, and agreement to decentralise roughly half of the income tax in Scotland might not have been predicted. Second, the process of securing agreement to substantial constitutional change across two general elections (Scottish and UK) and two changes of administration (in Edinburgh and London) was without precedent. It shows a remarkable degree of careful policy-making against a background of virulent political disagreement.

The third remarkable thing is how little this is remarked upon. During the referendum debate, it obviously suits the SNP to argue that the present constitutional arrangements are inflexible and fail to give Scotland powers it might reasonably expect. So they never talk about the Scotland Act 2012. It’s perhaps less obvious that each of the pro-union parties – who should be able to take credit for a creative policy change that moves substantially in the direction of median Scottish opinion, which is in favour of more devolution – do not appear to be giving it the attention it merits, even as they consider whether there is scope for yet more change.

But if the polls are correct, and the Scottish people decide against independence, we have a very clear picture of what Scotland’s territorial constitution will be like in 2016, and this will surely set the pattern for any further development of the devolution settlement. Devolution will move on to its next phase.

Professor Jim Gallagher, Research Fellow in Politics, Nuffield College, University of Oxford

Scotland: some known unknowns

By Professor Iain McLean. This article first appeared in the spring 2014 edition of the RSGS's magazine, The Geographer.

If we vote ‘Yes’ on 18th September 2014, we do not know what we will get, apart from the departure of Scottish MPs from Westminster. To borrow Donald Rumsfeld’s useful phrase: the remaining terms of independence are ‘known unknowns’. The Scottish negotiators must enter discussions with several counterparties, such as the European Union, NATO, and the rest of the United Kingdom (rUK). I discuss seven of the ‘known unknowns’.

The European Union

The Scottish Government acknowledges that “it will be for the EU member states… to take forward the most appropriate procedure under which an independent Scotland will become a signatory to the EU Treaties”. Scotland wants to enter under Article 48 of The Lisbon Treaty. Many doubt whether that is feasible, but if it is, the parties would be the UK and the European Council. Scotland would not be a party at all. Under the more plausible Article 49, it would be in control of its own application. But it would not automatically inherit the various opt-outs and rebates that the current UK has secured from the EU, such as the contributions rebate and an optout from the Schengen common travel area. The outcome of those would emerge from negotiations with a counterparty (the European Council) whose composition is currently unknown.

NATO 

The Scottish Government wants both to join NATO and to get rid of the Trident submarine fleet from Faslane and the armaments store from Coulport by 2020. I cannot say how NATO’s Council would respond to these two commitments. But, as the Council acts by unanimity, I can say that its position would be determined by whichever member state was both most hostile to Scotland’s proposals and prepared to threaten a veto.

Rest of the United Kingdom (rUK) 

After a ‘Yes’ vote, there would have to be negotiations with representatives of rUK over a huge range of issues, including:

• splitting UK assets and liabilities; 
• sharing some existing UK services, including overseas embassies and consulates, the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Authority (DVLA), and the BBC;
• the Common Travel Area currently comprising the UK, Ireland, the Channel Islands, and the Isle of Man (this negotiation would also involve the other counterparty governments);
• sterling and the Bank of England; 
• Faslane and Coulport. 

For some of these, international law offers a default position. Were the parties, after failing to agree, to submit their dispute to arbitration, there are principles of international law that would determine which party got what. Unlike in a divorce, I do not think it is remotely likely that Scotland and rUK would have to go to arbitration on any of these issues. But the common knowledge of what would probably happen if they did go to arbitration will set limits. On other matters – most obviously Faslane and Coulport – principles of international law will not help the negotiators. On those, a purely political bargain must be struck.

Splitting immovable assets – land and buildings – is easy. Those located in Scotland go to Scotland. Those located in rUK go to rUK. Immovable assets located outside the present UK would fall to the rUK as the ‘continuator’ state, although the Scottish Government wishes to negotiate for the shared use of UK diplomatic premises. Movable, tangible assets such as tanks and computers would be assigned according to their purpose rather than their location. In most cases, this would have the same consequence as a split by location, but in some cases (for example, military equipment, or equipment relating to UK government functions currently carried out in Scotland) it would not. 

Splitting liabilities could be more controversial. In relation to the UK’s existing stock of government bonds on issue, HM Treasury has stated that “the continuing UK Government would in all circumstances honour the contractual terms of the debt issued by the UK Government. An independent Scottish state would become responsible for a fair and proportionate share of the UK’s current liabilities. An entirely separate contract between the continuing UK Government and an independent Scottish state’s Government would need to be established. The respective shares of debt and the terms of repayment would be subject to negotiation.” 

Various principles for apportioning liabilities between Scotland and rUK have been suggested. The Scottish Government says, “The national debt could be apportioned by reference to the historic contribution made to the UK’s public finances by Scotland, or on the basis of our population share. We may choose to offset Scotland’s share of the value of UK assets against our inherited debt.” 

The problem with the ‘historic contribution’ proposal is that there cannot be an uncontroversial starting date except 1707. Data are scanty for the first 200 years or so of the Union. But any later starting date may be seen as arbitrary and chosen to maximise bargaining advantage. As there is no default position in international law for the ‘historic contribution’ apportionment, for most liabilities the choice would be between ‘population share’ and ‘relative GDP’. Population share is simple and an obvious default. Considerations of ability to repay may, however, push the parties towards an apportionment based on relative GDP.

The Scottish Government insists that, once North Sea activity and tax receipts are assigned to Scotland, Scottish GDP per head will be higher than that of rUK on Independence Day. A relative GDP assignment of liabilities would therefore be less favourable to Scotland than a population share assignment. For the liabilities and contingent liabilities arising from the UK bailout of failing banks in 2008-9 (including RBS and the then Bank of Scotland group), I am not aware of any agreed principles of international law that may be applicable.

Shared services 

This should not be difficult, so long as the distinction between assets and institutions is borne in mind. As recently explained by Adam Tomkins, John Millar Professor of Public Law at the University of Glasgow, “international law shows you that, in the context of a state succession of this nature, there is every difference between institutions and assets. Institutions of the UK become institutions of the rest of the UK, but assets of those institutions fall to be apportioned equitably.” The assets of the DVLA and the BBC (studios, computer systems, vans, etc) may be apportioned equally. But as institutions, they would be institutions of rUK after independence. It is only common sense that Scotland should then seek to buy some services from them, but that would be a matter of contractual agreement.

Common Travel Area (CTA) 

The CTA should be easy, on two conditions: (i) that the EU does not insist on Scotland joining the Schengen Area, which would normally be part of the acquis communautaire; and (ii) that Scotland is willing to co-ordinate its policy on migration with rUK, Ireland, the Isle of Man, and the Channel Islands. Condition (i) is a matter of common sense, which I hope will prevail. Condition (ii) may be more problematic if the Scottish Government after independence maintains the current Scottish Government’s wish to “take forward a points-based approach targeted at particular Scottish requirements… [and] a new model of asylum services separate from immigration.” An immigrant to one member of a common travel area is an immigrant to all of them. Therefore, in negotiations to remain in the CTA, all of the other parties would have to approve Scotland’s migration policy.

Monetary policy, and Nuclear policy

 

This leaves the two most difficult areas. The Scottish Government insists that Scotland would remain in the sterling area, and would seek membership of the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England. It argues that that is in the interests of rUK as well as of Scotland, because the present UK is what economists label an ‘optimum currency area’. The UK Government insists that the rUK government would not agree to that; a stance backed by both the Liberal Democrat and Labour finance spokesmen. Sterling is an institution, not an asset. Therefore, after independence, it would become an institution of rUK. Its negotiators may then reconsider whether admitting Scotland to a currency union is indeed in the interests of rUK. The ‘optimal currency area’ argument should have some traction; but so too will arguments which conclude that the near-collapse of the eurozone from 2009 onwards occurred, among other reasons, because some eurozone members were fiscally undisciplined. rUK would insist that if it admitted Scotland to a common currency area, Scotland would have to agree to harsh rules capping its maximum public debt and deficit.

Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England, said in Edinburgh in January that “Any arrangement to retain sterling in an independent Scotland would need to be negotiated between the Westminster and Scottish Parliaments.” He went on to point out that a monetary union requires close co-operation between its member states on budgeting and bank regulation. On bank regulation, for instance, “The European process illustrates the difficulty of building the institutional arrangements for a common insurance scheme across sovereign states. This is unsurprising since mutualised deposit guarantee schemes imply a pooling of risk and loss of sovereignty. All member states must be persuaded that they won’t simply be left with the bill for the mistakes of others.”

Whereas on currency and banking Scotland’s position appears weak, on Faslane and Coulport it appears strong. An independent Scotland could not be a nuclear weapon state, because of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) of 1970. Therefore it is proper for Scotland to give notice to rUK that the nuclear-armed submarines and warheads would need to be removed from Scottish soil. What is unclear is how the rUK would respond. In any case, the UK political parties and the armed services are in the middle of arguments about how, or whether, to replace the present Trident deterrent force. These arguments cut across parties (and services). I cannot predict the stance to be taken by the UK government which will be elected in 2015. Even if negotiations are started by the current coalition government, its position on Trident and Faslane may be altered by the new government. Apart from the terms of the NPT, international law is no help here. The outcome, whatever it is, will be intrinsically political.

I also predict that deals on these difficult issues will be linked, even though they are conceptually separate. There is no logical connection between Scotland’s currency and rUK’s nuclear-armed submarines, but there will certainly be a political connection. I do not know how this most important pair of known unknowns will end up.

Professor Iain McLean, Official Fellow in Politics, Nuffield College, University of Oxford

Nae Mair Skyscraper Weans? Glasgow’s Red Road Flats and the 2014 Commonwealth Games. - Gerry Mooney

Nae Mair Skyscraper Weans?

Glasgow’s Red Road Flats and the 2014 Commonwealth Games

Gerry Mooney
Faculty of Social Sciences
The Open University in Scotland
(May 2014)

I’m a skyscraper wean, I live on the nineteenth flair,
But I’m no gaun oot to play ony mair,
Since we moved to Castemilk, I’m wasting away,
‘Cause I’m getting one less meal every day.

O ye canne fling pieces oot a twenty-story flat,
Seven-hundred hungry weans will testify to that,
If it’s butter, cheese or jeely, if the bried is plain or pan,
The odds against it reaching earth are ninety-nine to one.

The Jeelie Piece Song (Skyscraper Wean)
Adam MacNaughton)


2014 Commonwealth Games Controversy

Arguably most large sporting events around the world today attract some degree of opposition and criticism. Witness events in Rio throughout 2013 and 2014 ahead of the football World Cup 2014 and the Olympic Games in 2016. On a smaller scale, but nonetheless important reflecting as it does conflicting views of its value to the city, the Glasgow Commonwealth Games of 2014 has also attracted opposition, opposition that has been galvanised by a well-publicised proposal for the opening ceremony announced in early April 2014.

That Glasgow’s iconic Red Road Flats would be demolished as part of the opening ceremony of the Twentieth Commonwealth Games in July and August 2014 generated criticism that few might have been able to predict, given the very particular history and unpopularity of the Red Road Flats.  The ceremony will take place a few miles away at Celtic Park, where live footage of the demolition was to be beamed on huge screens. For the City Council and Commonwealth Games leaders, this demolition was intended to signal the new world, the new age that Glasgow has apparently entered. For the leader of the Labour-controlled Glasgow Council, the proposed demolition was to be ‘symbolic of a changing Glasgow’; showing that the city has a bright future, the legacy of the games.  But critics of the demolition observed that the demolition could in fact be read in a dramatically different way. 

Within days of the proposal being announced it had already attracted considerable opposition from community activists, artists, politicians and a petition started within hours of the news attracted well over 16,000 signatures. The proposal caused a furore that extended beyond Glasgow. Scottish and UK newspapers have carried the story as have local TV and radio stations and the BBC online news site and various social media sites have been heavily populated with Red Road commentary and stories.

The Red Road Flats generate sharply opposing views: loathed by some, defended by others. The fact that many people were prepared to campaign against proposals to demolish the Red Road Flats as part of the Games’ opening ceremony came as a surprise to many. What is it about these high flats in particular that has aroused such passions?

The Red Road Flats in Historic Context

Glasgow built more public sector high rise housing developments than any other city in Western Europe in the post-1945 era. In an effort to address historic problems of slum and overcrowded housing, by far the worst in the UK, the city embarked on a large-scale programme of high rise developments. One of the earliest manifestations of this was the Moss Heights development located in the Cardonald area, 6 miles to the south west of the city centre. Constructed in 1953, they presented a vision of housing for the city which would dramatically alter not only the skyline, but also reshaped the social geography of housing in Glasgow. Together with a massive programme of low rise housing estate development across the city, contained primarily in the four large ‘peripheral’ housing estates on the city’s outer-edges (in Castlemilk, Drumchapel, Easterhouse and Pollok), by the 1970s Glasgow Corporation was the largest public sector landlord in Western Europe with over 185,000 houses on its books and well over 60% of the population of the city living in publicly rented housing. 

The Red Road development rapidly became the iconic high-rise housing scheme in Glasgow, if not Scotland as a whole. Located in the north east of the city, they were the highest public sector tower blocks in Europe at the time when the first tenants took up habitation in 1971. Built between 1964 and 1969, the eight towers, which ranged from 28-31 storeys high, were to house almost 5,000 people. At almost 300 feet high, the views from the upper floors of the blocks extended well beyond Glasgow to the mountains of Argyll to the West, Stirlingshire to the north and almost to Edinburgh in the East. The blocks are readily visible to people arriving in Glasgow from the North and from the East by train or car from the M80 and M8 motorways.

For their new tenants the Red Road Flats, together with Glasgow’s other newly built housing schemes, represented a vast improvement on the slum housing they had lived in previously. It was not just the views that attracted people, but the running hot and cold water, inside bathrooms and separate kitchens which were absent in older tenements. The flats are then symbolic of an era in which state provision of affordable housing to rent was highly desirable to the working-class.

However, the architecture and construction of the blocks, steel-framed concrete slabs in a style since then referred to as ‘Modernist Brutalism’, was the subject of early complaints, reflected in difficult to heat and draughty houses. It wasn’t too long before the Red Road became not a hallmark of Glasgow’s advance in public sector housing design but a symbol of poorly constructed and hard to let council housing.

At a surface level, the proposed demolition of the Red Road flats exemplifies the argument that Glasgow's extensive post-war investment in poorly designed and built high-rise council housing was a strategic social and economic blunder. But there is a deeper level to the symbolism of the demolition of Red Road. It somehow manages to cue to a wide audience that it is waste of time and money to try and provide council housing for working-class people. It always ends up in failure.

But who is responsible for this failure?  Not the architects and town-planners that grabbed their opportunity to make vainglorious statements in design terms. Not the engineers who designed the building systems which promised to house the workers in their millions. Not the politicians who had their palms greased to buy these building systems. It was the tenants' fault that these developments didn't work! 

Of course, while few are saying this explicitly, in the case of unsuccessful council housing, it is the victim who is blamed. The Red Road – like similar housing developments across the rest of Scotland and the UK – is a prime case in point. The message of the imagery of demolition is simple: it really is not worth the effort or money involved in housing construction of this type. 

The demolition of the Red Road flats actually symbolises the current UK governments’ (as well as for the previous New Labour administrations) efforts to ensure that social housing is a residual category fit only for people with multiple and intractable problems: the chronically poor, drug-addicts and alcoholics, the mentally-ill, the homeless, refugees and asylum-seekers. 

At the start of this piece I have included Adam MacNaughton’s Jeelie Piece song. It is a song much loved in Glasgow because it captures the isolation that many tenants experienced in life in the high rises of Glasgow. However, it also reflects the positive aspects of life in such schemes. Skyscraper Weans no longer enjoyed the opportunity to run in and out of their homes seeking sustenance, especially when the lifts were often out of action. The Jeelie Piece Song reflected also the sense of isolation that many of the residents of the high rise blocks felt. In what became the official mantra of many of the studies of such developments, there was an absence of ‘community’, and the tenants often remembered the close-knit communities of the older tenemental districts with nostalgia. While no doubt there was a considerable romanticisation of the past in such views, nonetheless most high rise housing developments were constructed with little thought given to the provision of community or leisure facilities. For the then Glasgow Corporation, the housing mission throughout the post-War period was ‘build the maximum number of houses in the shortest possible time’.

Featuring Red Road

As Lynsey Hanley highlighted in her evocative book Estates, council estates do not often appear in a positive way in word, film or song. In the last few decades, council housing has come to be seen as second-best housing, relegated to a residual status for the most impoverished sections of society. Such estates have become emblematic of all that is claimed to be problematic about contemporary Britain – symbolic of what David Cameron has called the ‘broken society’ (see Mooney, 2009; Hancock and Mooney, 2013).

Many would probably represent the Red Road development in such a way. It has appeared in numerous films, television dramas and documentaries such as Scottish Television’s Taggart police detective series, and the Bafta-winning Red Road (2006) directed by Andrea Arnold. While both deal with the darker side of Red Road life, they have contributed to the Red Roads’ notoriety. Further, many other artists, writers and filmmakers who made it the subject of their work. Art exhibitions, planning, architectural and photography projects have taken the Red Road as their inspiration or focal point. Other projects have included oral history interviews with some of the earliest residents and other attempts to capture some of the more positive aspects of life in the flats. Alison Irvine’s book, This Road Is Red is a collection of semi-fictional stories based on anecdotes from real-life residents over the 50-year plus history of the estate.

Planners, architects, housing researchers and other academics have long investigated different aspects of the Red Road development. Few council estates can claim such attention and importantly, much of this is not of the negative ‘council estate porn’ type that is prevalent in the media in recent years, such as BBC Scotland’s The Scheme and Channel 4s Benefit Streets.

The Beginning of the End for the Red Road

Arguing that the Red Road Flats are iconic does not mean that criticism of the blocks should be muted in any way. Of course they did address a desperate housing need for successive generations of Glaswegians and, more recently, for students and newly arrived refugees, by the end of the twentieth century they had gained a reputation as unattractive places to live, and many of the flats were vacant for a considerable time. With two blocks already demolished, the plans for the Commonwealth Games opening ceremony was to see a further five blocks demolished – live! The one block to be preserved, at least until 2017, was intended to accommodate refugees, giving the strong impression that this kind of housing is suitable only for people ‘of that kind’!

The Commonwealth Games and Red Road Flats Controversy: Why is it Important?

As has proved to be the case with other ‘flagship’ sporting events, the Twentieth Commonwealth Games, Glasgow 2014, has not been without controversy. Finding the money to stage such a huge event is one point of contention – not least in the context of ‘austerity’ and wide-scale budget cuts and reductions in public services and funding. As has been the case in the past, some people have been forcibly removed to make way for new ‘legacy’ sporting and related developments. New private sector investment opportunities are promised on the back of the Games, while new roads and infrastructure developments have already been put in place around the East End of Glasgow in particular (the East End ‘Regeneration Route for example) to enhance the attractiveness of previously derelict areas for capital accumulation.

‘Legacy’ has become the by-word for such event; how will large sporting festivals contribute to the longer prosperity of a host city?  Who is it that decides what should be the legacy? The people of Glasgow or corporate and political elites (See Glasgow Games Monitor; Gray and Mooney, 2009; Paton, Mooney and McKee, 2012). While some social housing will emerge from the Games, in the shape of the athlete’s village in the Dalmarnock area, the number of units to be made available will fall well short of early promises.

The idea of a city ‘reborn’, a city ‘renewed’ is being signified, it is argued, by the demolition of the Red Road flats as ‘Glasgow’ looks ahead with renewed vitality to a bright new future. But this also symbolises the destruction of what, for many, is not only an important part of Glasgow’s working class history – but also of the idea that public sector housing provision has a crucial role to play in meeting housing needs today – needs that are acute across Glasgow and much of the UK. For critics then, claims about regeneration and renewal are vacuous; legacy is a meaningless term. The Commonwealth Games and the planned demolition of the Red Road flats resonate as a classic bread-and-circuses stunt.

It will come as no surprise that such criticisms have been rejected by those responsible for the Glasgow Games:

This is about more than creating an iconic moment for the Opening Ceremony; it is about the next step in the regeneration of one of Glasgow's most famous communities. It symbolises the changing face of the city over the years and recognises our proud social history. Glasgow's Opening Ceremony is right to celebrate that history, but we will do so in a sensitive manner.

We have worked with former residents for the last six years to get the story of Red Road. This is their story and the voice of real Glaswegians should rightly be heard during the ceremony and the story of Red Road should be shared with the world. Of course, this is one small part of a much larger show that will entertain, inspire and show Glasgow in a spectacular light.

The demolition of the flats is not about social failure - in fact, the opposite is true. The flats were once the future of social housing in the city and over the years have been home to thousands of families. We are celebrating their role in our history and want to make sure their role is properly marked.

(Bridget McConnell, Chief Executive of Glasgow Life, quoted in the Glasgow Evening Times, April 7, 2014)

While supporters of the Commonwealth Games claim the demolition of the Red Roads flats as an icon of the ’new’ Glasgow, critics observe that it is also a symbol of the present government’s blatant attempt to destroy the whole concept of council housing. The destruction of council housing estates, not matter how widely they are welcomed and by whom, is not just an act of physical destruction but also implicitly an attack on council tenants, or of the idea of council tenants. They belong to a welfare and state dependent population that for many politicians in the three main UK parties – are best confined to a by-gone era: this is the picture of council housing as ‘the land that time forgot’! It is also the marginalisation of a particular history – of particular working class histories; housing is not just bricks and mortar – there is a historical voice in each and every estate – one that is sharply out of step with the top-down voice of a Glasgow renewed.

Towards A More Progressive Housing Legacy

Glasgow has had a longer history of severe housing problems than any other in the UK. That the local authority and 2014 Games leaders should seek to celebrate the opening of the 2014 Commonwealth Games with the demolition of its most (in)famous post-war housing scheme, has attracted considerable criticism, is to be welcomed.

However, there is another housing history in Glasgow which political elites would rather forget. Arguably Glasgow did more than any other city in Britain to ensure the provision of council-housing for the working-class. The famous 1915 Glasgow Rent Strike was crucially important to the provisions of the 1919 Housing & Town Planning Act, which established the principle of the state’s provision of housing. The protracted struggles of Clydesiders over the rents and housing issues ultimately paved the way for state housing provision as a norm – a norm that was to last until the late twentieth century. These are the struggles worth celebrating; this is the legacy of history locally. While Glasgow’s leaders seek to destroy or at least marginalise this legacy, it is instructive that a campaign is also underway today to commemorate Mary Barbour, whose army of working class women took to the streets of Glasgow’s tenement districts during the First World War to fight against rapacious private landlords.

A more fitting legacy for Glasgow would be the launch of a new era of good quality and affordable public sector housing for rent, under the control of democratically elected politicians. Well-built, low rise or high rise but including the very social amenities that were overlooked in previous developments, such as at the Red Road. This does not represent a return to some mythical or golden past but of the recognition that the provision of housing for all is the mark of a socially just society. The Scottish Government have already abolished right to buy for new tenants of social housing and embarked on a small but symbolically significant programme of social housing new build. As Scotland looks ahead to a future that may involve full Independence, or of further devolution, the mark of the good Scottish society will be to end housing problems for once and for all. Now that would be a legacy worth celebrating, would it not?

References

Neil Gray and Gerry Mooney (2011) ‘Glasgow’s New Urban Frontier: ‘Civilising’ the Population of ‘Glasgow East’’, City, 15, 1, pp. 4-24.

Lynn Hancock and Gerry Mooney (2013) ‘‘Welfare ghettos’ and the ‘‘Broken Society’’: Territorial Stigmatization in the Contemporary UK’, Housing, Theory and Society, 30, 1, pp. 46-64.
Lynsey Hanley (2007) Estates, Granta.
Alison Irvine (2012) This Road Is Red, Luath Press.
Gerry Mooney (2009) ‘The ‘Broken Society’ Election: Class Hatred and the Politics of Poverty and Place in Glasgow East’, Social Policy and Society, 8, 4, pp. 1-14.
Kirsteen Paton, Gerry Mooney and Kim McKee (2012) ‘Class, Citizenship and Regeneration: Glasgow and the Commonwealth Games 2014’, Antipode, 44, 4, September, pp. 1470-1489.

Other sources:
http://www.bestlaidschemes.com/
http://athousandflowers.net/
Glasgow 2014 Games Monitor http://gamesmonitor2014.org/

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