SCOTTISH SPECIAL

A lot of con going on in Glasgow

Rory Knight Bruce

For a city given to expansive gestures, the events in Glasgow's European City of Culture year are on a grand scale. More than 2,000 shows will be spread before 10 million people at a cost of £50 million. All over Glasgow, new meanings have been given to the post-theatre drink, with bars °pen until two in the morning, although Sauchiehall Street, once the symbol of Friday night excess, is now a lamb-like boulevard, where unaccompanied ladies are unpestered.

Mention the old image of Glasgow, of a street-fighting child-molester with its un- employed finger in a chip-shop till, and the city's promoters will boast that Glasgow now has the second largest Sheriff court in Europe and will soon have an enormous lock-up police station where the Gorbals used to be.

Of all the exhibitions, the current favourite, just opened, is 'Glasgow's Glas- gow', a history of the city which gave the world Tobias Smollett's writing, James Watt's steam engines, Adam Smith's eco- nomics and John Shanks's lavatories. Here is the Barras, the depressed area which gave birth to The Slosh, the Sixties craze for Conga-dancers who couldn't dance. It is an exhibition as spectacular in variety, if not size, as those of 1884, 1901 and 1911, when Glasgow was still the 'second city of the Empire'. What does it matter if, among the exhibits, the Shanks's simulated bath- room has run out of water, that Glasgow University's induction coil interactor has been vandalised and that the wind-up nostalgia machine', a what-the-butler-saw contraption, has broken down? To the visitors who have paid £4 each, not a lot. But outside I ran into a group of six huddled in the sleeting rain, clutching their banners, to whom it matters rather more. `Boycott this Yuppie fraud', says one message. 'There's a lot of con going on in Glasgow,' sounds another, mocking the Saatchi advertising jingle: 'There's a lot going on in Glasgow.'

One of the six, indistinguishable from the rest in drab clothes that Oxfam would reject, is James Kelman, the 43-year-old author whose sixth book A Disaffection was shortlisted for last year's Booker Prize. (The BOoker critics sourly dubbed him `Billy Connolly with philosophy'.) 'To me it's heresy,' Kelman says of Glasgow's cultural gorgings.

He continues his theme in MacSorley's bar in Midland Street, where he is joined by fellow writer Farquhar McLay, who looks like an unshaven Kingsley Amis, and the veteran Clydeside poet Freddy Ander- son, who has a long beard, beret and full-length purple coat, topped by a black knit ruff.

`Serious art and writing in the City of Culture has taken some fatal knocks,' says McLay. 'Those who draw attention to it are put down as spoilsports.' But his argument is economic as well as cultural. Glasgow has a reputation for offering free shows to its citizens. Its galas and miners' fairs are still an essential part of the city's fabric, despite the dearth of miners to lend them authenticity. Of Strathclyde's three million residents few are involved in the City of Culture, according to this im- promptu seminar. Yet Glaswegians have contributed £20 million to the City council towards the cost of the cultural year.

It was Burns who wrote: A fig for those by law protected! Liberty's a glorious feast!

Courts for cowards were erected Churches built to please the priest.

The MacSorley bar philosophy feels that festivals were made for frauds, that Glas- gow has been given over to tourism, property speculators and marketing men desperate to lure financial institutions to the Clyde who will then fail to put any money back into the community. (Freddy Anderson's answer is to quote Byron and Shelley at length under his breath and hope he lives until 1991 when the City of Culture year will at last be over).

It is a philosophy which has not received wide support, which saddens Kelman, no champagne socialist. On the contrary, he drinks Johnny Walker Black Label, smokes Player's untipped, and winds down from his writing in the Scotia bar, where Clydeside poets come to water.

The foundation for such bitterness lies not just in what is happening during the City of Culture year, but in what has not happened in such areas of Glasgow as Castlemilk, Drumchapel and Easterhouse. They make up a sizeable part of Glasgow's 170,000 council houses, mainly built in the Fifties and called The Schemes. They are the largest council house tracts in Europe, and in a condition of dereliction not found

SCOTTISH SPECIAL

anywhere else in the British Isles. Unem- ployment here has never been less than 20 per cent and 42,000 of these houses are 'at risk and below a tolerable standard'.

John Joplin, 21, unemployed and living on The Schemes, explains his dilemma. 'It costs me £1.30 return to get to the city centre. The Schemes are facing dereliction while the councils sells off prime sites to developers at knockdown prices. Culture Year won't help the future of low-paid jobs in the service sector.'

For a city whose masculinity was born out of the Leviathan of Clydeside ship- building, the transformation from worker to waiter was never going to be easy. But it seems the dream of Glasgow as a harmo- nious workers' co-operative, welcoming big business and creating service indus- tries, is a long way off.

This year's cultural activities are the latest step in an attempt to bury old Glasgow and present a new and smoother face to the world. It began in 1983 with the opening of the Burrell collection. More than five million visitors have now been shepherded past this rather mediocre mer- chant's collection in Pollok Park, while older Glasgow treasures, the People's Palace and the Kelvingrove Art Gallery, do not enjoy the council's marketing favour or fervour.

Burrell, who resided in Edinburgh, Glasgow's sparring partner, during the second world war originally intended his collection for Scotland's capital. But when the railings of his grand Charlotte Square mansion were melted down for the war effort, he exercised the tyrant's right and switched his bequest to Glasgow.

At the time the Burrell was opening, there was a revival in the works of the architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Then came the Glasgow school of young artists, one of whom, Stephen Conroy, recently held an exhibition in the Marl- borough gallery in London. All 49 paint- ings, priced from £5,000 to £20,000 were sold. Conroy is the latest trophy on the marketing men's sideboard.

Whether Glasgow, as this year's Euro- pean City of Culture, is art, exaggeration or distortion seems to pale beside what has yet to be done for the city. Areas of such wretched depression as still exist should not be cynically forgotten in the gold-rush.

The finest view of Glasgow, so the saying goes, is looking back. For many Glaswegians, this is a view they cannot afford. If Glasgow really is to be 'miles better', as its lumbering promotional boast asserts, then there's still a long way to go.