Glasgow
Notebook Garscadden is Glasgow's dreariest district, straggling to the west along the north bank of the Clyde. In normal times no one would think twice abciut Labour holding Garscadden in next week's by-election. It is an oldfashioned safe Labour seat, working-class through and through; more than ninety per Cent of constituents are council house tenants, the highest figure in the country; at the last election Labour had an absolute majority over three other parties. But these are not normal times. The Scottish National Party claims to be running first in its canvasses. The Tories say that they are second behind Labour. These mutually contradictory claims at least suggest that the result is very hard to predict. If the Labour Party can lose a mining seat — Ashfield — it can lose anything, and Scotch politics are more turbulent yet than English. Apart from the Communists and the Trotskyists there is also on the Left a candidate from the rebel Scottish Labour Party. The Liberals have chosen the better part of valour, and to hang on to 150; they are not standing. At a Labour party meeting, speaking alongside the candidate, Mr Donald Dewar, and Mr Jimmy Reid was the Rev Murdo Ewen McDonald, a quiet, impressive old Kirk preacher. He made a joke about the fissiparous tendencies of the Scots in religion and politics. The secession churches from the Kirk had been the Free Church of Scotland, the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland, known as the FPs, and the IndePendent Presbyterian Church, known as the Split Ps: 'the SNP are the split Ps of politics'.
Mr Dewar, and the SNP candidate Mr Keith Bovey, are both Scots-genteel, douce lawYers. By contrast the Tory, Mr lain Lawson, IS a tough, young, small businessman (he looks like his fellow Glaswegian John Banks the bookmaker). It is no doubt snobbish to mention it but he has by far the thickest Glasgow accent of the three: the new Tory party never ceases to surprise me. This ought to help him in the New Scotland Where it rather looks as if the official language will be, not, of course, Gaelic, nor Burns's 'Doric', nor the Lallans of Macbiarmid, but Basic Glaswegian. There is a newspaper cartoon strip, Wheech McGee', in which the characters say things like 'Witye gaunny dae wi him noo . Jist brek ra spell he huz ower aw wur folk'. I can just follow that but not the slogan which the ScotNats sport on buttons and tee-shirts: 'Era rerr idea'. The fastidious Englishman Will tend to disdain this new Scotch sensibility, a sort of tartan kitsch woven from Pub culture, football hooliganism and Billy Connolly. For such sensitive souls, had
news: 'Ally's Tartan Army' is to be succeeded by 'The Flower of Scotland' sung by Rod Stewart and the World Cup XI.
The campaign is being fought on several issues, including prices and unemployment of course. Redundancies are threatened at the Goodyear plant at Drumchapel, and at the Singer sewing machine plant at Clydebank. Telegrams of protest, advice and beseechment have been flying in all directions, though there are probably things which influence Cabinet Ministers — let alone executives of multi-national companies — more than telegrams from byelection candidates. Mr Bovey rashly let it be known that he is a pacifist, not a popular conviction on Clydeside which gets its living in large part from the arms trade. One important issue is abortion. The Tory is taking an anti-abortion line, and the ScotNat is trying to catch up with him. This sheds an ironic light on the national revival in Scotland. Abortion is an issue in Garscadden because so many of the constituents are not 'Scottish' at all: well over a third are Irish Catholics by descent.
Only the next general election will tell whether the ScotNat tide has begun to ebb. Conditions at Garscadden and in Hamilton (which the SNP may well win at the forthcoming by-election) are misleading. Still, whatever else it may be the SNP is the children's party. The Tory candidate claimed to have seen two twelve-year-olds canvassing for the SNP. The charge was formally denied. But on my way to a meeting I was accosted by two children younger than
twelve — not of course official canvassers — who asked if I would be voting SNP. And the primary school hall, where the meeting was held, evidenced what could precisely be called infantile nationalism: every painting or cut-out figured the tartan or the St Andrew's Cross. Even without nationalism there is an odd flavour to Glasgow politics. There was an item on the local news on Friday morning, which I did not make up, about which I have not discovered the precise details, and which I cannot get out of my head. At a recent meeting of the Glasgow District Council, a Labour councillor 'attempted to influence the voting by hiding up a chimney'. That is all. Can closer students of Clydeside politics enlighten me?
Glasgow remains a fine town. In the centre it has thankfully escaped the devastation of Birmingham or Liverpool — inner ringways and sky-scrapers. This makes it all the sadder that Garscadden, on the outskirts, should have been so ill-used. The Victorian tenements of Glasgow had an unjustly bad name. Poverty turned them into slums but they could easily have been renovated. They have been in some parts of the city; but not everywhere. Garscadden does not contain the late Sir Basil Spence's infamous Maryhill flats (they lie to the east), but the council-built tower blocks are hideous and squalid enough. Mr Dewar admitted that their building had been a mistake. This has become one of the monotonous politicians' palinodes of the age: if only we had known it wasn't a good idea to force the working classes to live in tower blocks we should not have done it. In fact, of course, anyone could have told them it wasn't a good idea, and some did so. The Garscadden high-rise flats are particularly badly designed, with under-floor electric heating. This is one of the most expensive ways devised of heating a dwelling and not only pensioners have had a chilly winter. The ten per cent rise in electricity charges just announced in Scotland has not come at a helpful time for Labour.
There is in Hope Street a perfect example of intelligent and loving renovation of an old building. A home was needed for the Scottish Opera. Instead of putting up some repulsive and impractical new building they have restored the nineteenth-century Theatre Royal. The attention to detail shown by the restorers, Arup Associates, has to be witnessed to be believed. On the one hand sentimental detail — brass taps in the lavatories, on the other practical detail — high gloss paint for acoustic effect on the dados in the auditorium. The Theatre Royal is a standing reproach to London, for this is exactly the way the National Theatre should have been housed. It is an even deeper reproach to the capital city of Scotland, whose refusal to build an opera house is a story that has run as long and as drearily as The Mousetrap. Glasgow is no mean city; Edinburgh is a very mean city indeed.
Geoffrey Wheatcroft
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