THE OTHER EDINBURGH

Andrew Neil on the unpublicised,

but highly visible, face of Scotland's festival city

A YOUNG German student spent the early part of this month having his face rebuilt by surgeons at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. The 22-year-old, who was in Scotland's capital to study English at sum- mer school, was making a call from a tele- phone booth late one evening when two punks opened the door, dragged him out, forced him to the ground and kicked him repeatedly in the face. They stopped and ran off only when a passer-by shouted at them — but not before relieving the student of his wallet, leaving him with a face reduced to red pulp and amnesia brought on by the trau- ma of this completely unprovoked attack. It took place during the week Edinburgh enjoyed the dubious distinction of being host to a punk festival, an annual event which attracts over 1,000 punks from all over Europe, so we cannot be sure that the thugs who set about our visiting German were local. But there was no official apolo- gy or any mark of contrition from the city fathers (or mothers — this is a PC city) within whose bailiwick the savage attack took place.

It was not, however, an isolated event: a few weeks before a Japanese student was beaten up wandering round Calton Hill, an historic site overlooking the city but also the notorious haunt of rent boys and gay- bashers alike. Only this week, a man walk- ing in the city centre, near the Royal Mile, accidentally brushed against a Mohican- haired girl, apologised to her, but was badly beaten by the two punks with her. Those of you who have not recently vis- ited this glorious, genteel city will probably be surprised at the very notion of Edin- burgh hosting a punk festival. But this is not the city it was.

For my part, I never thought I would come to associate Edinburgh with the stench of urine. I have wonderful memo- ries of school trips to the city when Castle, Scott Monument, Princes Gardens and Zoo made it a magical place for any inquisitive child. As an adult who made infrequent trips on business I regarded Scotland's capital as civilised and refined, if a little snobby and sleepy. But, though I knew Edinburgh had its social problems and share of bad housing (like every other city), I never associated the city centre with urban squalor. I do now.

The smell of urine and sight of dog excrement is what sticks in my mind every time I make the short walk from the back door of the Scotsman down the steps to Market Street, across the railway station and up Waverley Steps — that and the beggars' gauntlet of scruffy, intimidating, usually intoxicated youths demanding cash. When I first saw Trainspotting, a depressing film about Edinburgh heroin addicts, I thought how untypical it was of Scotland's great capital (most English folk, even the editor of this esteemed publica- tion, think it is set in Glasgow). Little did I realise that the Trainspotting culture had invaded the very heart of our capital.

Large chunks of the centre of Edin- burgh — Scotland's premier showcase to the world — have been allowed to deterio- rate into a filthy, shabby disgrace. The people of Scotland deserve better of their capital; the citizens of Edinburgh should demand better. But, so far, they have cho- sen to lumber themselves with a do-noth- ing city council with different spending priorities and a politically correct culture that inhibits them from taking the harsh measures needed to clean the place up.

There was a time when Princes Street was one of the urban glories of the world. Today it represents all that has gone wrong with the city. On a recent sunny evening I walked its length, from east to west. It is a sad, schizophrenic experience, even in good weather. On one side is a vista to make the heart soar, Castle, Mound and Gardens combining to provide one of the great urban landscapes of the world; on the other, a sight to make the heart sink.

The pavement was littered with rubbish. Pedestrians picked their way through the cans, paper and even bottles that were strewn everywhere, mostly dropped by careless folk but some falling from over- flowing rubbish bins. There was not a street cleaner to be seen. During the Festi- val this month, when the population of the city explodes, it was even worse: I turned into the historic Royal Mile last Saturday to be confronted by wastebins overflowing with rubbish and spilling on to the street. Plastic bags spread over the pavement, with no one in sight to collect them. There was plenty of human refuse too.

Princes Street has become the preserve of panhandlers. You can barely move with- out being approached by some threatening character for money. Doorways have been colonised by beggars and their dogs. When even midtown Manhattan seems safer and cleaner, you know douce, demure Auld Reekie is in trouble. This week the Scots- man quoted the police as saying that, if the council gave them the appropriate bylaw, they could sort out the panhandler problem in an afternoon, since the worst culprits are well-known to them (and according to the police make £50 a day from their begging).

Nothing escapes the dereliction. Even the entrance to the New Club, exclusive watering hole of the Edinburgh establishment and just as exclusive as anything on London's St James's Street, is regularly guarded by its own vagabond. His presence, plus the build- ing's brutalist architecture and elaborate electronic security on the front door, give it the demeanour of the outside of a council block in a sink estate rather than the door to a posh gentleman's club.

The external appearance of the New Club (whatever its internal glories) symbolises Princes Street's decline. The pass was sold many years ago, with the connivance of the city planners, to barbarian developers and crass commercial outlets. A street of coher- ent, elegant buildings was destroyed, to be replaced by an insipid collection of postwar eyesores. The magnificent, forbidding facade of Jenners (the Harrods of Edin- burgh) stands in reproach to what has hap- pened — and in memory of what once was.

The price has been catastrophic. Far from being one of the great shopping thor- oughfares of the world the street has been taken over by every tatty retailer in the land, whose ugly shopfronts seem to be restrained by no planning restrictions, except those that tolerate bad taste. Sensi- ble folk escape to shopping malls on the city's periphery, or to Glasgow, where the shops are superior. As a result, Edin- burgh's flagship street has shopping amenities on a par with Liverpool.

It is probably too late to put Princes Street together again. Irretrievable dam- age has been done. The glory of the street was its combination of vista, garden and buildings. It has been riven asunder. But past mistakes cannot excuse the obligation to keep what is left clean and tidy — or impose some planning on shopfronts to reflect the magnificence of what is on the other side of the street. But even where old architecture has been left intact, the city allows it to be vandalised.

The steps of the Royal Academy, an imposing art gallery in mock-Greek style slap in the centre of Princes Street, are the preserve of a small army of scruffs who drink, take drugs and urinate with impunity, abusing passers-by who look twice or refuse to heed the rattling of their begging bowls. The council's answer is regularly to hose down the steps with undiluted disinfectant.

Nobody seems to ask why these folk are allowed to accumulate unimpeded on such a treasured building in such a prominent site. In any self-respecting city this sort of building would be displayed in all its glory. Instead, Edinburgh mocks its Academy by surrounding it with tatty ice-cream vans and threatening vagrants, while weeds and fungus grow out of its roof.

It is a sad symbol of the consequences of the municipal socialism which still grips nearly all of urban Scotland. Most Scottish cities and towns are run with all the effi- ciency of a steel mill in Stalinist Russia. Edinburgh is no exception. When the city council recently screwed up enough courage to suggest a handful of redundan- cies from its bloated workforce, the unions threatened to bring city services to a halt.

The council is constantly pleading poverty, but it has a far bigger budget than any other city of equivalent size and strange spending priorities: it has just spent millions painting the streets green (to designate lanes where cars cannot trav- el) rather than devoting more resources to keeping the pavements clean.

Edinburgh badly needs some zero-toler- ance policing to rid its streets of louts and layabouts — an essential prelude to any cleaning up of its urban environment. But Lothian police seemed constrained by a political culture that prefers to look the other way. As a result, the normal laws of any civilised society — against vagrancy, intimidation, street crime, public drunken- ness, fouling public footpaths — are regu- larly flouted. Rather than enforce the law around the Academy, the city proposes to fence it off.

Part of the sickness now afflicting Edin- burgh is that those in authority no longer seem to care. The city is caught in the rigor mortis of neglect. The Labour-con- trolled council has shaken off the loony- Left tendencies which threatened to dominate when Labour wrested control from the Tories many years ago. But the dead hand of municipal socialism rather than imaginative public enterprise or municipal pride still dominates.

While the private sector has built a mag- nificent new financial centre in the west end (with the added bonus that the wonderful 18th-century New Town is returning to resi- dential use once more), the public sector has allowed the east end to become a derelict eyesore: two huge Scottish Office buildings, the Royal High School (which until last month was supposed to house the Scottish Parliament) and the old GPO build- ing all stand empty; wasteland only seconds from the city centre remains undeveloped.

The good news is that the people of Edin- burgh have started to care what is happen- ing to their city. When I first expressed the sentiments in this article in the Scotsman in June, I expected a torrent of abuse from Scotland's inveterate lefty letter-writers. Of course, they had their predictable say; but the mailbag and calls to the office were overwhelmingly supportive.

There is even the chance that the council will be shamed into action. It has already reluctantly come to terms with private enter- prise, with the result that gleaming new busi- ness parks are springing up near the airport and the city's economy is generally strong. There is even a Blairite tendency, struggling to break free of the dead hand of Old Labour, which wants to introduce road pric- ing and turn over the running of the city cen- tre to a private company.

Despite the best efforts of those who run it, Edinburgh still has plenty going for it. Its historic architecture is still largely intact; the planners have not done the widespread damage they have done to other city centres. The city's economy will be boosted by the devolved Scottish Parlia- ment, which should give it the vitality of a capital city it currently lacks (on some nights it's like a mausoleum).

Such prospects are made all the sweeter because they beckon at a time when the ancient enemy (no, not the English — Glas- gow) is in decline once more after its marvel- lous renaissance of the 1980s, brought down again by a corrupt, one-party municipal socialism far worse than Edinburgh has ever seen. The opportunity for Edinburgh to clean up its act is there. If it does not take it, what hope for progressive policies from its forthcoming parliament?

Andrew Neil is editor-in-chief of the Scots- man, where elements of this article first appeared.