If there’s any part of Glasgow with No Mean City gouged on its forearm in
sharpened Biro, it is Glasgow North East.
The constituency, taking in a slice of Bishopbriggs in the north to the
fringes of the city centre in the south, brings new shades of meaning to
fearsome; it is urban squalor in every hue, an area that looks as if it is
helping police with their enquiries.
The UK Polling Report guide says Glasgow North East is one of the “most
degraded, deprived and crime-ridden parts” of the country. Come here and you
are left supposing it was just being diplomatic, though, as you shuttle
between the mean, flatlining shopping centres and the vast sciencefiction
interzone of the Red Road flats.
If you want to know how hardcore Glasgow North East is consider the following:
Mikey Hughes, an independent candidate in the constituency’s forthcoming
byelection, was threatened by two youths demanding money as he campaigned,
despite the fact that he is clearly blind. To add a dash of symbolic insult
it happened in Sighthill. Hughes was runner-up in last year’s series of Big
Brother yet even this renown in the ratty world of ned and chav counted for
little: “I said, come on, you’re kidding, I’m blind,” Hughes recalls.
The consensus is that this particular by-election will probably be a steal for
Labour, which regards such gritty, largely Catholic constituencies its
birthright. Admittedly the SNP were surprise winners in the demographically
similar Glasgow East last year, but that patch feels like a 1960s free love
and macramé commune compared to Sighthill, Springburn and Barmulloch.
Shorn of political suspense, then, the by-election has found itself assuming a
rather flighty, whimsical demeanour. Taking to the stump is a rag-tag band
of minor celebrities and fringe candidates, some of whom, one suspects, are
driven more by personal vanity than any deeply held political conviction.
Hughes, currently 100/1 to win the seat,is campaigning with a duster and tin
of Pledge, evidence of his desire to clean up Westminster. Like every other
contender for the former seat of the Commons Speaker Michael Martin, Hughes
is hot on the issue of MPs’ expenses.
There are other splashes of colour in this greyest of seats. Sunny Delight
orange in the case of Hughes’s fellow Big Brother contestant Tommy Sheridan
who is running too, a last interlude before he settles down to his trial for
perjury in the new year. Having been ousted as an MSP, the hirsute socialist
firebrand is urging voters to “try before they buy”, giving him a short-term
contract to represent them at Westminster and dropping him at the general
election if they aren’t satisfied with his performance.
There are two former BBC broadcasters, Ruth Davidson for the Conservatives and
David Kerr for the SNP. Topically, there’s a BNP candidate, Charlie Baillie,
a ruddy-faced electrical contractor proud to be “Scots by birth, but by the
grace of God British”. However, the would-be MP on whom most beady eyes are
focused is John Smeaton, the amenable but unlettered folk hero of the 2007
Glasgow airport attack.
Margaret and Alice, two feisty characters who won’t see 75 again, are
custodians of the tea urns and the custard creams — and, as the afternoon
wears on, the tots of whisky, gin and vodka — at the Alive and Kicking
community centre in Barmulloch. They are keepers of the gate when it comes
to what passes within this centre for the active elderly, in the shadow of
the titanic high rises.
Hence, Smeaton has been guided to give the pair particular attention. This, a
tea dance to the strains of a silver-topped country and western duo, is the
first big meet-the-voters sally of his campaign to become the new member of
parliament. As his chaperone struggles to move him through the room Smeaton,
standing as an independent but bankrolled by the Jury Team, the
parliamentary reform outfit, gives Margaret and Alice a good 15 minutes of
what Smeaton does best — though, to be frank, this is redolent less of a
politician than of a hospital visitor. On the stump Smeaton appears to have
two basic settings: mustn’t-grumble saloon-bar joviality and, when pressed
to mull on weightier matters, the thoughtful, sad setting where he looks as
though he’s dividing 65 by 17 in his head.
“Ladies, I’m here to blow sunshine,” he tells them by way of an introduction.
Margaret and Alice set about itemising the woes of this fractured and
fearsome constituency, from its six threatened school closures to its
galloping benefits culture. Smeaton, leaning on the counter next to the
KitKats, gazes on with eyes wide as though trapped before a particularly
harrowing edition of Panorama.
Margaret tells him a tale involving heroin addicts in Springburn shopping
centre and Smeaton’s brow furrows as if he’s now doing calculus. Eventually,
though, he succumbs to the ministrations of the chaperone and moves on, to
one of the centre’s many other tables of cheerfully opinionated pensioners.
“Nice boy,” says Alice as he goes, “he should mibbe stand in that
by-election they’re having.”
More than two years after the attack on Glasgow airport, Smeaton remains a
name, a face, the embodiment of Glasgow’s conceit of itself as the capital
of reckless bravado. His appeal to voters, however, seems to draw on the
synergy between disturbing attitudes within the community he’s striving to
represent and what it was he did that day in June 2007, intervening
forcefully when Bilal Abdullah and Kafeel Ahmed struck.
Smeaton, as far as many in Glasgow North East seems to be concerned, laid into
one of “them”, a foreigner, a Muslim, a sponging, treacherous incomer. In
the Alive and Kicking centre this fact alone seems to accord him a gold
star: “I collect my pension every Thursday and the post office is queued out
with Africans and Asians and God knows who, stuffing their pockets with
notes,” says one of the centre’s tea dancers. “This isn’t our country any
more. So I applaud John for standing up to those people.” The sentiment is
echoed widely and leaves you wondering how he would have fared in Glasgow
North East had the terrorists he banjoed been white.
For some voters it may not matter that Smeaton appears to know next to nothing
about politics. Not in the sense that he struggles to name the prime
minister who succeeded Anthony Eden, but in the sense that he’d struggle to
name the one who succeeded Tony Blair had he not once met him at a function.
The levers, protocols, precedents and institutions of power are mere rumours
to him.
Instead, Smeaton’s campaign is politics as jazz, a freeform, improvised
response to whatever floats into his purview. Actually, it’s more religious
than anything else, with Smeaton promising to vanquish adversity in the
constituency just by really, really wishing it away. Like the other
colourful candidates in this election he’d be even more lost without the
expenses scandal, an explicable, monolithic enemy. Whenever any encounter
starts to flag Smeaton has only to quip about duck ponds and momentum is
restored.
Smeaton’s campaign, if successful, will usher in for Glasgow North East a sort
of political bob-a-job week. Smeaton favours an approach in which
constituents will tell him what’s up that week and he then sets about the
problem. Accordingly, he has no policies as such, beyond a handful of fuzzy
unopposable ambitions.
There is one, issue, however, that is central to Smeaton’s campaign — dog
mess: “We need to speak to the council, get some signs up,” he frets. “We
have to clamp down on dog-fouling big style. Especially near schools. It’s
just not on.”
While the fringe players try to extend their 15 minutes of fame, Labour is
quietly upbeat with Willie Bain, a local and a senior lecturer in public
law. Labour MPs say voters are looking them in the eye this time, which is
more than they could say in Glasgow East. “A lot of people are saying
they’re very disappointed with us over expenses but there’s not the same
hostility this time. They’re not saying they won’t vote for us,” says one.
Another adds: “There is a different mood from a year ago among our
activists too. They know this could be the final fight before the election
and they’re motivated.”
Alex Salmond, who promised a political earthquake ahead of the Glasgow East
by-election is getting less carried away this time round, positioning his
party as the underdog. While Salmond and his party remain popular, their
struggle to deliver promises on class sizes and decision to release the man
convicted of the Lockerbie bombing has removed some of the sheen.
“John Mason, the SNP’s victorious candidate in Glasgow East, already had a
local political base in the constituency, where he was clearly a very
popular local councillor,” says John Curtice, professor of politics at
Strathclyde University. “This is certainly not going to be any easier and it
is not apparent that the SNP are putting the same effort in. Undoubtedly
Labour were caught with their pants down in Glasgow East — in the end they
lost because of organisation — one trusts it has learned its lesson.”
Meanwhile, Curtice argues, the Scottish Conservatives will have to raise their
game dramatically if they hope to demonstrate that David Cameron’s
popularity extends much beyond Gretna. “The Tories have a credible candidate
but the question is whether they can secure a higher share of the vote than
they did in Glasgow East,” says Curtice. “The Tories badly need to start
demonstrating that some of the Cameron vibe is coming north of the border.
It would be the first green shoot.”
Despite all the evidence to the contrary Smeaton insists, in his dauntless
Eeyoreish way, that it is all to play for. He dismisses the notion that a
career in politics is merely a new way of stringing out his weird
post-attack celebrity that has brought him a newspaper column, a show at the
Edinburgh Fringe and standing invitations to every do on the civic and
charity circuit.
In Glasgow East, Smeaton seems happy to expose his shortcomings for the sake
of a new forum. A week is a long time in politics, but it’s even longer when
nobody knows your name. And any week seems long in Springburn and Barmulloch.
Your Comments
Order By: