Free Radical Page 12

  A series of major issues then had the effect of heightening the tensions within the new Labour administration. There was a new Conservative government and an education minister, Margaret Thatcher, who was determined to stop the post-war system of providing free school milk. The decision caused particular outrage in Glasgow where levels of poverty were high and diets poor. There were living memories of rickets. Even those who were not exceptionally motivated by the issue of school milk saw the potential threat to local decision-making from a minister in London imposing her will on all councils, and on Scotland, regardless of local priorities. I took the lead in the Labour group, arguing for a strategy of passive resistance: refusing to implement the legislation. I was encouraged by John Mains, who saw this as an excellent issue on which to campaign and to rebuild party unity, which was coming under some strain. For a while, the resistance and the popular support we received had a unifying and, indeed, euphoric impact. But once senior officials started to spell out the implications of continued recalcitrance, including the threat of surcharges on individual councillors, resistance started to crumble. The revolt ended in the worst possible way, with a majority of us voting to continue the opposition and a minority, including most of the leadership, voting with the Conservatives and Progressives to end it.

  This campaign established me, improbably, as a champion of the Glasgow left-wing and I milked the popularity it gave me. I rather foolishly confided to one of my colleagues that I found it incongruous to be promoting socialism in the council chamber and free-market economics in the university lecture rooms on the same day. I was reminded, unsympathetically, of a quote from Jimmy Maxton, that ‘if you can’t ride two horses at once you shouldn’t be in the bloody circus’. I tried to assimilate the advice.

  A growing polarization of the ruling Labour group on broadly left–right lines created the basis for the next big split, over council rents. We had hitherto been kept together by the political skills of John Mains, who had the knack of making most of us feel important and valued, and recognizing merit even where there were serious disagreements. He died at this particularly difficult juncture and Sir William Gray, who took over, though a brilliant administrator, lacked his political authority. The issue of rents was politically highly charged because the Conservative government proposed to tackle the whole system of cross-subsidy within local government, under which personal and commercial rates were used, at least in Glasgow, to keep rents low. There was certainly a case for reforming the financing of council housing and both Robin Cook in Edinburgh, where he chaired the housing committee, and myself in Glasgow produced papers offering a critique of the government’s proposals, combined with alternatives. But, as with the school milk issue, even those who saw the need for reform were united in opposing centralist, Tory, solutions. There were, moreover, genuine difficulties in imposing large and rapid rent increases on low-income families, because even if they could gain access to the promised means-tested housing benefit they would face high marginal withdrawal rates and work disincentives. Another rebellion was organized and history repeated itself with a predictable mixture of tragedy and farce. Glasgow was one of the last councils to comply with the new law – just soon enough to avoid the surcharges that were imposed on councillors in Clay Cross. The Labour group split along similar lines as before.

  These confrontational issues did not arise in a political vacuum. There was, in the city at large, a political radicalization taking place in response to developments at UK level. The Heath government is now primarily remembered for the decision to enter the Common Market and for the miners’ strike that effectively finished it off. But in its first two years the government was full of reforming energy and set a course later to be followed by Mrs Thatcher as prime minister. One of its most controversial decisions, made by DTI secretary Nicholas Ridley, was, in effect, to force the closure of Govan’s Upper Clyde Shipbuilders (UCS), one of the city’s main employers, rather than facilitate a rescue bid by a workers’ cooperative until new investors could be found. Although Yarrow, further downstream, remained as a military shipbuilder, UCS was the last remaining outpost of an industry that embodied the city’s manufacturing tradition and, directly and indirectly, employed thousands of skilled engineering craftsmen. There was remarkable cross-party support for the UCS workers, who were brilliantly marshalled by the communist shop stewards Jimmy Airlie and Jimmy Reid. Reid, in particular, was a magnetic speaker, powerful yet humorous, and his inaugural address as Rector of Glasgow University was one of the finest speeches I have ever heard. One of my friends, a university lecturer called Frank Herron, who came from a Govan shipbuilding family, subsequently made a compelling economic case that the costs to society of additional long-term unemployment exceeded any savings from the closure. But with hindsight, the closure was inevitable, later if not sooner, and although Ridley presented the government’s case unsympathetically, as an English upper-class toff indifferent to the industrial heartland of Britain, he anticipated today’s more critical approach to government intervention.

  I was personally caught up in the UCS campaign and took considerable pride in marching along Sauchiehall Street with my son Paul on my shoulders, alongside Tony Benn, Jack Jones and other celebrities who came to Glasgow to join the massive protests. The UCS campaign also coincided with the rent rebellion and, indeed, part of the rationale for the latter was for the councillors to show solidarity with the workers in opposition to the Tory government in London. There was a mood of radicalism in the city which, while it was often couched in ideological terms, had a deeper cultural significance: an expression of the city’s, and Scotland’s, identity.

  The climate of opinion also created conditions for a coup within the Labour group. A group of us who had been identified as radicals put forward the Reverend Geoff Shaw as group leader, and he won; while I was elected to one of the senior positions on the executive, in effect the Cabinet. I was very proud of this achievement since I had lived in the city for less than five years and was very conscious of my middle-class Englishness. I also liked to think that the coup was a turning point in the way the city was run. The group who seized control of the council, which included Jean McFadden, Bill Harley and Pat Lally, provided the city’s future leadership. The takeover was portrayed, at the time, as a victory for the left. In one sense it was. And there was some overlap between the radical left of the Glasgow Labour group and the Communist Party, which was strong in the unions, if not electorally. There were also, at this time, the first stirrings of Militant. But, unlike in London and Merseyside, the Clydeside left had a strongly down-to-earth, pragmatic quality. Paradoxically, the main consequence of the change in the council was to open the way to new and more liberal ideas.

  One change was a re-examination of entrenched attitudes towards housing. Housing dominated the city’s political agenda like no other issue and accounted for 90 per cent of my casework as a councillor. The traditional approach was to clear the slums as rapidly as possible and decant the population into council housing: the three big perimeter schemes – Easterhouse, Castlemilk and Drumchapel – or multi-storey blocks near the city centre. Of the latter, the tower blocks of the Gorbals (Hutchesontown) won prizes and were initially regarded as a great success.

  The only policy issue was how to speed up the rate of slum clearance and building. One of my earlier memories of group meetings was an earnest debate prompted by one of our colleagues who wanted to sell off the Kelvingrove Art Gallery, including Salvador Dalí’s masterpiece Christ of St John of the Cross, to raise more money for council housing. Shortly afterwards, the fateful decision was taken to build the Red Road development, which later became notorious for its inhuman scale, insensitivity to the needs of families for space, and neglect of the practical problems of keeping stairwells clean and lifts functioning. There were some murmurings of unhappiness among councillors at the time, and we had access to a growing volume of literature warning of the problems created by multi-storey blocks of social housing. Bu
t an election commitment to step up the pace of council-house building proved decisive. We achieved close to five thousand in one year.

  It was increasingly obvious to most of us, however, from our casework, that the strategy was flawed. As it happened, Maryhill had two of the better-designed and more popular schemes – Wyndford and Cadder – but it also had a ‘problem corner’ of low-grade, inter-war housing where the ‘difficult’ families were parked. The better local schemes could not, however, accommodate those displaced by slum clearance, and I saw large numbers of families desperate at the prospect of being exiled to the Gulag, as the big perimeter schemes were increasingly viewed. Other families hated the idea of their children being stuck twenty storeys up in high-rise flats. Initially, many councillors and housing officers refused to accept that there was a problem and developed a language for describing ‘choosy’ and ‘difficult’ people who lacked ‘gratitude’ for what the council had done.

  But as dissatisfaction rose, there was a search for a coherent alternative. The Conservatives advocated more private housing for owner-occupation to leaven the lump of social uniformity of the inner-city multi-storeys and perimeter schemes. Although this was basically a sensible idea, and was adopted some years later by the Labour council, it was roundly dismissed at the time because it would reduce the space left for council housing. Moreover, it did not get to the root of the problem: that many of those who were being cleared and rehoused wanted to stay put in what the council regarded as ‘slums’.

  The problem came to a head in my ward when the council decided to demolish a series of blocks of old tenements. Far from being delighted at the prospect of being rehoused by the council, the residents – both owner-occupiers and private tenants – protested furiously and sought to reverse the decision. They were helped by a group of campaigners – dubbed ‘anarchists’ by the council – who had access to legal advice and pointed out that there were alternatives, including the refurbishment of the old buildings. I was initially caught between trying to help my constituents and defending the council, and unsuccessfully tried to persuade the council to change tack. A high-profile confrontation developed which attracted the press and television. When some of the residents were rehoused, their flats were boarded up, which then attracted squatters, and the remaining protestors – who would not accept offers of rehousing unless it was local – found themselves living in increasingly squalid conditions before they were forced out by the sanitary inspector. The rebellion petered out, but I was determined that it should not happen again.

  Some months later, the council’s planners turned their attention to another tenement block nearby, on the Maryhill Road. This time I surveyed the residents and found that most wanted to stay. Helped by the fact that I now held a more senior position after the internal coup, the council agreed to make Maryhill a pilot study for refurbishment. The idea was spreading and, helped by a unit at the university that had architectural and planning skills, more and more schemes of this kind were adopted across the city.

  Another area in which new thinking was playing a part, and to which I made a contribution, was transport policy. In the early 1970s Glasgow’s planners, like those in most big British cities, saw the future in terms of a network of urban motorways. The leading planning guru of the time, Colin Buchanan, argued for the separation of pedestrians and roads with a combination of car-free shopping centres and residential areas connected by fast car routes. Glasgow bought into this vision and Buchanan was, in fact, its main consultant. Leading councillors saw new motor-ways, like blocks of multi-storey council houses, as emblems of a modernized, dynamic city. The plan was already well developed when I arrived on the council and several motorways were under construction or planned, notably the main east–west route.

  There was, however, already in the city a questioning of the new orthodoxy and I devoted myself to challenging it. I was galvanized in particular by a proposal to build a motorway through my ward designed to take commuters from the middle-class suburbs of Bearsden and Milngavie into the town centre a little faster. The fact that the motorway would be built on stilts through the middle of an attractive, low-density council-housing scheme, Cadder, and lead to the demolition of a large amount of perfectly sound tenement housing, appeared not to disturb the planners in the least. I mobilized the residents, who were unaware of the plans, to object. A still more controversial plan was for an inner ring-road which involved a stretch of overhead motorway very close to the medieval heart of Glasgow, and this enraged Glasgow’s small but growing amenity and environmental movements. There was frustration, too, at the neglect of public transport: buses, which were crowded and increasingly expensive, and a ramshackle old underground system.

  I was able to play a modest but useful role in changing the strategy by combining a local populist campaign, for public transport and against the motorways, with economic questioning of the technical assumptions behind the consultants’ reports. I published an article in New Society that linked the controversies in Glasgow to the wider national debate. I had been appointed to the planning, highways and transport committees and spent much of my time on the council locked in battle with the planners and the highway engineers. After the coup had changed the balance of the Labour group, I was able, with allies, to kill off at least the excesses of the urban motorway programme. In particular, the Maryhill motorway and half of the inner ring-road were never built, and the council pressed ahead with the modernization of the ‘Clockwork Orange’, the underground railway.

  The third change I was able to make was in understanding poverty and social deprivation. When I arrived on the council, poverty was seen in rather simple and mechanistic terms: basically, poor housing. The persistence of deprivation in the new housing schemes, and the seemingly insurmountable financial problems faced by many families, caused the emphasis to change. I launched a couple of initiatives that were then somewhat ahead of their time but did, I think, later take root. One was to establish a ‘ one-stop shop’ advice centre in Maryhill. I obtained the funding for a Citizens’ Advice Bureau, but was unable to recruit volunteers to staff it. Shelter later filled the gap. I also persuaded university colleagues to devise software for a system to help residents identify their benefit entitlements, then being made more complex by the new housing benefit and a means-tested family benefit, family income supplement, the forerunner of tax credits. IT systems were then a good deal more primitive than today, depending on punch cards to store data, and the project was considered challenging. Some of my more conservative colleagues were also appalled at the thought that raising awareness of benefits might encourage ‘scroungers’. A pilot scheme was nonetheless approved and I believe that Glasgow maintained and improved the system subsequently.

  One indirect consequence of this work on poverty was that I came to the notice of the Rector of Edinburgh University, a postgraduate student called Gordon Brown, who was putting together the Red Papers for Scotland, and he invited me to contribute. At that stage, Brown was known primarily in the world of student politics but talked of, like Robin Cook, as a coming man: very bright and with radical new ideas, part of an Edinburgh group developing independently of the Clydeside Labour heart-land. The book had a wider significance in giving a voice to a new generation of Scottish Labour politicians, and while its socialist approach to policy has not stood the test of time, it has recently generated some good-natured repartee between the two of us, with speculation as to which of us has subsequently moved furthest to the right.

  I recently revisited my own chapter, which is dense and rather dull but focused on the right issue: the extraordinarily entrenched, multidimensional poverty of inner-city Glasgow. Three decades on, the problems remain depressingly similar. When I was asked a few months ago to support a Lib Dem-led campaign against school closures in my old ward of Maryhill, I was struck by how little had changed for the better and by the still jarring contrast between the low living standards and low expectations of my former constituents and the thriving mi
ddle-class suburbs of Bearden and Milngavie a mile or two up the road.

  Enjoying modest celebrity status as a high-profile Glasgow councillor took me into several bigger debates. One concerned devolution. There had long been a rift on the left between those of a nationalist bent, who emphasized Scottishness and Scotland’s egalitarian and social democratic traditions, and the unionists, who dominated the Labour Party leadership. The unionists were led by Willie Ross, the secretary of state for Scotland in the first Wilson government, who was a fine, principled and respected, but unbending, man. The rise of the SNP in the late 1960s in Labour’s industrial heartland and a Tory government, apparently unsym-pathetic to Scotland, reopened this old divide. A key new factor was the discovery of North Sea oil and the nationalist slogan ‘It’s Scotland’s Oil’ had great resonance when Scotland was hit, no less than the rest of Britain, by an oil shock. A case began to be made for devolution, in intellectual terms, both in the Brown book and by Andrew Hargreaves, who happened to be an English correspondent in Scotland for the Financial Times. Some of the new generation of Labour politicians started to run with the issue of Scottish devolution. One was a rising star, John Smith. Another was John Mackintosh, a former professor who won a parliamentary seat in 1966 and was a brilliant, witty speaker who would surely have risen to great political heights had he not died young. Others included the MPs Jim Sillars and Dick Douglas, both of whom later joined the SNP. Although it took twenty-five years for the ideas to come to fruition, the Labour Party (and the Liberals, who were a growing force in the Highlands and a few urban outposts like Greenock) became firmly committed to devolved government.