If you’ve never been there, the first thing you will notice about the proposed M74 extension is that scenic beauty does not exist on this route. Quite the contrary: surveying its course you can see immediately that when this road is finally built it will dissect parts of Glasgow made ugly by industry and extreme poverty.

“This is not the Newbury bypass,” concedes Will Jess, chairman of Jam 74, the group that has led protests against the road. He knows that middle England — or its Scots equivalent — will not fall in behind a folk hero like Swampy in defence of a green and pleasant land. “This land is not pretty. The areas this road is going through are the poorest in the city.”

I spoke to Jess last week, before the collapse of a case in the Court of Session, which had been brought in opposition to the motorway extension by Friends of the Earth. That outcome means that, after more than a decade of protest, the final barrier was removed to the construction of the link between Cambuslang on the east of the city and the Kingston Bridge.

The latest delay has had its impact. Transport Scotland, which implements Scottish executive policy, said it expected this legal case to have increased costs by up to £20m, thanks to the inflation of construction and land prices. The road will now be completed at a cost of up to £500m.

The protesters remain undaunted. Friends of the Earth and Jam 74, an alliance that includes members of the Green and Scottish Socialist parties, have long claimed to represent local opinion — though opponents accuse them of masquerading as community champions to promote extreme socialist and environmental policies. Last week, before their case was lost, I set out to discover who these protesters were.

Jess, a likeable man and a teacher at a Glasgow secondary school, took me to Southcroft Park in Rutherglen, home to Glencairn football club since 1896. In the evening sunlight, with bees hovering among buttercups on the pitch, it was possible to imagine someone loving this place enough to fight the plan to drive a highway through it. But local footballers had already dropped their objections in return for compensation and a new home. So why were Friends of the Earth and Jam 74 still fighting? For Jess, who was a Green party candidate in the 1999 and 2003 elections, the reason is not hard to find. His home is on the proposed route of the new motorway. His fellow protester Richard Lyons, a psychiatric nurse, also lives close to the proposed route. These two men hate the prospect of seeing a highway barge through the place they call home.

But they are not typical of local opinion. The truth is, admits Jess, the group has struggled to stimulate local opposition. Only 10 people attended their most recent meeting at Govanhill community centre this month. “Local communities are not very animated about it,” says Jam 74’s chairman. “They are not middle-class activists. This is a very poor part of Scotland where political engagement is virtually nonexistent.”

His opponents see things rather differently. “My constituents have been through this before,” says the Pollockshaws councillor Stephen Curran. “Environmentalists said the M77 extension would not work. But when it was completed people noticed a real reduction in local traffic. They expect the M74 to have the same impact.” The opposition to the motorway extension is based in the community, says Curran, but comes from those “with an ideological axe to grind”.

“We do not campaign for fluffy bunnies,” Duncan McLaren, chief executive of FoE Scotland, told me before the organisation withdrew its case last week. And even after the collapse he struck a defiant note. “We are enormously proud to have fought for economic and environmental justice.” he said. “This case illustrates just how hard it is to get justice for communities and the environment in Scotland.”

Drivers looking forward to an easy passage in and out of Glasgow shouldn’t expect the dispute to die away just yet.

Times Recommends

• Milk: do we need a dairy godmother?
• DIY: the women doing it for themselves
• First double portrait of Princes unveiled