4 Comments

1. JuliaM says:
   November 13, 2009 at 10:23 pm

   Gotta get rid of the password protection first! I could only get in by going direct to this story in the RSS widget…
2. Sam Duncan says:
   November 13, 2009 at 11:34 pm

   I thought something was up. I would have said, but… er, your server was down.

   “AND BRING THIS BLOODY GOVERNMENT TO ITS KNEES.”

   Yeah! Woohoo! Etc.

   The bastards won in Glasgow North East last night. Fuck. Still, the only serious threat was from the “Nationalists”, so the place is pretty much a lost cause anyway.
3. Jeff Wood says:
   November 14, 2009 at 9:49 pm

   Sam, it has been commented elsewhere that in that part of Glasgow, there are more smackheads than Conservatives. Lost cause, in every sense.

   Fifteen years ago I visited an address there several times. The house was on a council scheme, and every time I got out of the car the youngsters who were hanging around would evaporate. My friend eventually explained that I looked like a cop.
4. Sam Duncan says:
   November 15, 2009 at 11:13 am

   Very true, Jeff. I know the area well. My mum grew up there. It used to be (relatively) nice then. And it was still fairly decent when I was a kid.

   Then they knocked it down. Literally. There’s almost nothing older than about 40 years left. Balgray Hill, “where the doctors and teachers lived” as the older residents always tell you, was the first to go, of course. So much for slum clearance. Not that there were any in the poorer parts, either. It was never a Gorbals or Anderston. It is now.

   And don’t get me started on the way they drove a motorway through it, turning the once bustling Springburn Road, the main artery into the city from the north, into a dingy back street. The entire area is an object lesson in the state-sponsored destruction of a community. It’s certainly true that it took a massive hit when two of the three railway works that employed the vast majority of its residents closed. But it was the Glasgow Council that kicked it, repeatedly, when it was down, and dealt the killer blows.