A New Deal and Vision for Glasgow

As the ongoing cultural crisis rumbles on, the debate about creating a new vision for Glasgow intensifies. Gerry Hassan speaks to a range of people and suggests some starter-ideas to take things forward. 

Glasgow has been in the news of late – the aftermath of another fire with talk of decay, decline and malaise. Arguably, this is a Glasgow industry itself – talking about the fortunes of the city going wrong – is this time any different?

Glasgow is a city of paradoxes, of competing – even contradictory – stories. There is the official story, that working smarter and more strategically will deliver the goods and the Panglossian hope of serial local leaderships that things will somehow turn alright.

There are a host of opposing accounts – of resistance and opposition; of local initiatives and self-organisation; another more miserablist about long-term challenges, alongside the pathologising public health narrative of “the Glasgow effect” and “a sick city in a sick country.” And that is just for starters!

All these stories have some element of truth but are also partial and selective and not the entire picture. What is uncontested is that Glasgow should be put centre-stage in public debate and priority, not just within the city but across Scotland, and that the status quo is failing people and no longer defensible.

Glasgow has positives. The city region is a powerhouse of the Scottish economy contributing one-third of Scotland’s total economic output. It is a centre of enterprise, innovation and ideas. A senior SNP policy adviser makes the case: 

Glasgow’s economic performance has been reasonably strong in comparison with other large UK city regions for some time. Scotland’s GVA per capita is the best outside the wider South-East so Glasgow is in a different context to all the other large post-industrial conurbations. Especially in that it has Edinburgh 45 miles down the road (which if you believe the latest figures is now richer than Greater London per head).

Glasgow is often compared to Liverpool and Manchester – economically, in ambition, their public realms and civic leadership. “The Manchester boosterist narrative” can be overdone, but what is obvious is that the partnership working of different levels of government, city-region leadership and public agencies is central to its success, and similarly that of Liverpool. 

James Mitchell of Edinburgh University states that:

Glasgow has huge potential but that has not been harnessed as it requires real, meaningful joint working across UK, Scottish and local governments including the range of public bodies within the jurisdiction of each. Building a consensus, avoiding blame games and making sure that respectful and open discussion are important.

Film-maker and academic Eleanor Yule from Glasgow observes:

I’ve lived in Liverpool now for eight years and it has all the best bits of Glasgow but also feels like there is investment and promise – not the feeling I get when I visit my hometown which seems to get more and more neglected each time I go – no Glasgow School of Art, no Rogano , no Centre for Contemporary Art, and now the building which had the Iru Bru clock, which I delighted in as a child, has gone.

Glasgow needs change, a new deal and a new vision. Here are ten thoughts on beginning such an approach breaking from the current complacency and inadequate approaches.

1. Rejecting the Official Story

The official story of Glasgow presents a version of an urban template told the world over. This advocates consumption, shopping and tourism alongside a view of the economy driven by inward investment and a branch-line economy with power and decisions elsewhere.

The main public bodies have sung from this sheet – which until the 2008 banking crash posed globalisation as the way to Glasgow prosperity and well-being. Post-2008 this official story has appeared increasingly threadbare and inflexible, but an alternative set of stories has yet to emerge. With the official story of recent decades discredited new stories of change and the future need to be encouraged.

2. Making the values of the city explicit and what people want

One conceit of the official story is that it is never fully open about the values underpinning it. It is an instrumental view of humans and relationships subservient to economic logic. Instead, a more human-centred set of values based on local needs, unique character of the city, building trust and relationships, and sustainability, needs championing. This should come from local people not institutions and from the different kinds of storytellers who make the city.

Sue Laughlin of the People’s Plan for Glasgow observes that there is a need for “a different imagination to the status quo” centred on “how we travel around, how we warm our homes, how we source our food, how we design our public realm, how we care for each other. Yet, public policy makers are indifferent to these alternative ideas.”

3. Glasgow City Council needs transformation

The city council faces huge challenges, not all of its own making. It has faced significant cuts to its funding from the Scottish Government over the past decade while having to pay the bill of the equality case for low-paid women workers. Yet, over the post-devolution era the council has failed to adapt and fundamentally change enough in how it works.

It has outsourced many of its delivery agents, creating a complex maze of outsourced bodies delivering key council services, weakening accountability and destroying public ownership. A different city council would for starters bring some of these agencies back into council control – beginning with Glasgow Life and City Properties.

4. A new regional strategic authority

Liverpool and Manchester have been aided by city-region leadership. Glasgow has lacked this since the abolition of Strathclyde Region in 1996. Successive Scottish administrations, Labour and then SNP, have failed to address this because it involves taking on local council fiefdoms who do not want to have to give up their patch. But if several English cities can do this, surely Scotland can for Glasgow?

The writer Alastair McIntosh notes that Glasgow has been undermined over decades: 

There must be urgent recognition at the UK level that industrial policy, for which Scotland never voted, has pulled the rug on Glasgow’s fiscal base. This has left the city poor and with a reduced status.

5. What kind of economy, growth and prosperity should Glasgow champion?

Glasgow’s economy has positives but is hampered by structural barriers in its labour force including severe inequality and generational worklessness: an accentuated version of the UK economy. This raises the question of what kind of economy Glasgow should advance post-globalisation, where are the jobs of the future arising from AI, and how can issues of ownership, control and growing local businesses be advanced?

6. Glasgow’s Waterfront

The city needs a new vision for the Clyde and its waterfront. The Clyde is one of the great rivers of the world, cutting through the heart of the city. Where once it thrived with work and energy, in the words of one observer it now feels like “a dead river” which “a large part of the city has turned its back on or forgotten about.”

Decades of talk and public regeneration have focused on the Clyde, but with no coherent plan linked to action ever emerging. Last weekend I was in Liverpool and visited the Mersey riverfront with a host of museums and attractions including the Museum of Liverpool alongside the Tate and forthcoming International Museum of Slavery. The entire riverfront is visually impressive, planned coherently, and connects the new to the city’s Victorian heritage. Glasgow does not even have a proper Maritime Museum.

7. Public realm and infrastructure

Glasgow’s Victorian heritage and public infrastructure needs attention. The crumbling nature and fragility of too much of the built environment can be seen in the serial fires of too many totemic buildings. Connected to this the city needs to have a coherent plan for the public services and goods which are essential to its citizens. One of the most critical is developing an integrated transport system which is publicly owned.

Ellie Harrison, author of The Glasgow Effect observes:

We need the Scottish Government to support our transport authority, Strathclyde Partnership for Transport (SPT), to bring the bus network back into public control, so they can deliver a fully-integrated, accessible and affordable public transport network across the region like Greater Manchester’s new ‘Bee Network’, or the recently released plans for South Yorkshire’s ‘People’s Network’.

8. Whose Culture City?

Glasgow’s cultural strategy has taken a huge hit in recent years. There has been a cultural vandalism at a local level along with cultural neglect and aloofness from the Scottish Government. The litany is grim: the Arches’ closure in 2015, Glasgow School of Art fires in 2014 and 2018 with no agreed plan for the Mackintosh Building eight years after the second fire; Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA) closure in January 2026; the delays to the refurbishment of the People’s Palace; and the ongoing crisis at the multi-venue Trongate 103.

This latter example is another tragic case of the city’s authorities undermining and destablising independent, acclaimed cultural enterprises – in this case, the Glasgow Media Access Centre, Sharmanka Kinetic Gallery, Glasgow Print Studio, Street Level Photoworks and Project Ability.

As Clare Henry, former Art and Culture Editor at The Herald, puts it: 

The lack of support from Glasgow City Council (GCC) for the arts in general is indicative of their short-term blinkered approach and ignorance. Not long ago Glasgow Life and GCC were using the visual arts and Glasgow School of Art’s numerous Tate-Turner winners as PR for the city.

Janie Nicoll, freelance visual artist, comments: 

Like many people the thriving cultural scene in Glasgow was the reason I moved here in the first place. Sadly, it feels like the arts in Glasgow have been taken for granted, like much of the Victorian architecture that makes Glasgow the special place that it is – hollowed out, neglected, sold off to developers.

She continued:

As ever the art sector is expected to somehow muddle through, an elastic band continually stretched. It currently feels like this is the final straw. To say that I am scunnered and angry at the current situation is an understatement. Glasgow City Council needs to take a long hard look at the way they support the arts in this city before there is nothing left.

9. Nurturing human relationships in the city

Glasgow is scarred by inequality and poverty. This is still entrenched and on numerous indicators going backwards despite many positive initiatives. Early years child development is now showing regressive trends which have until recently caught politicians and policy-makers unaware.

Alan Sinclair has championed this issue for decades and notes that:

If Glasgow was a book, you would note its shabby cover. More important than the cover is what is inside the book. Health visitors carry out an assessment at 27-30 months of every child in Glasgow. They report that 1 in 4 children are failing to meet one or more of their key development milestones.

10. Glasgow needs to be a national priority in the way it has not for the past 25 years

A vibrant Scotland needs a dynamic Glasgow at its heart. This is not currently the case. A city-wide and city-region leadership which speaks up nationally which is ambitious and takes on vested interests is missing. A national understanding of the importance of the city is absent from Scottish leaders – witness John Swinney’s dismissive comments at First Minister’s Questions last week on Trongate 103. It is missing a vision which unites city, city-region, and national institutions – and costing the city dear.

The wider context of Glasgow matters and has harmed the city. The abolition of Strathclyde Region and the entire regional tier of local government by the Tories in 1996 took away a strategic authority across the West of Scotland which redistributed monies from more prosperous areas to Glasgow and other parts.

The arrival of the Scottish Parliament in 1999 – initiated and first run by Labour with the Lib Dems – displaced the pre-devolution era in which Glasgow had major political clout. Its leaders mattered and had political muscle via COSLA; it was also the heartland of the Labour Party electorally – meaning that its views and interests mattered in the corridors of the party’s hierarchies. The era of devolution has undermined Glasgow’s role as it has that of local government whose leaders are no longer significant national figures as attention, powers and finances have been swept up and concentrated in the Scottish Parliament.

This has been added to by the SNP taking control of Glasgow City Council in 2017 and their failure under Susan Aitken’s leadership to address the major challenges. It can be argued that they inherited a tough legacy and landscape, but the cumulative decisions of the SNP in office have added to the city’s problems.

This latest story has several layers. First, the SNP internally prioritised winning Glasgow electorally at a council level to build a base at national level, recognising they had a historic “Glasgow problem” by-elections apart. However, what this did not entail was creating a political programme or vision of what to do with Glasgow once they captured the city. No plans were devised to make Glasgow a shining beacon of Nationalist success and a model for the future of Scotland. Rather as SNP documents made clear winning at council level was seen as building a base for national success: relegating Glasgow to a sub-story.

Secondly, since they won Glasgow the SNP have never publicly made the case for the city’s unique status and importance at a Scottish level. The city and the city-region need special recognition and a national agreement on its critical role nationwide – with funding and big projects to follow. Such arguments have not been openly made by Susan Aitken and others, and an opportunity was missed in the eight years Nicola Sturgeon was a Glasgow MSP and First Minister. An SNP ex-minister told me: “The SNP in government let Glasgow down. We just did not prioritise it or understand its needs and that failure can be seen in the state of the city today.”

Thirdly, the national political picture has negatively affected Glasgow – both under Labour and then the SNP. Both have been wary of making major structural changes which could have the effect of upsetting powerful vested interests and institutional forces. Moreover, they have slowly sucked up powers and monies from local government hoarding them at the political centre. And both have refused to confront the prejudices at senior levels in the Scottish Office and now Scottish Government which the policy analyst David Webster described as “an anti-Glasgow bias.”

It is not an accident that Nicola Sturgeon’s 460-page autobiography contains not one mention of Glasgow City Council despite her representing the city for a quarter century as an MSP. It is a revealing omission, saying much about her political priorities, and a damning one which reflects a political view of the world which has hurt and held back Glasgow.

Some will baulk at the above, wanting to ignore the mixture of mediocrity and mendacity towards Glasgow and thinking that all that matters is defending the SNP and independence. But such an attitude is apologising for the indefensible status quo, slow attrition and undermining of Glasgow, its fabric and citizens.

All political parties must shoulder some of the blame – the Tories for abolishing Strathclyde, Labour for its vision of devolution centralising power, and the SNP for its lack of ambition at a local level and failure to champion the city. The first step in challenging this is raising these concerns in public and addressing them. The recent catastrophic city centre fire and the forthcoming elections this and next May provide a catalyst and a vehicle respectively to start the process.

Glasgow could continue as it is. Thinking and remembering better days. Drawing on nostalgia. Noting that in places it still has successes economically and culturally. But isn’t Scotland’s first city worth more to all? Glasgow desperately needs a New Deal and a new vision before things get even worse for its citizens and for the rest of Scotland. 

Glasgow matters to all of us and urgently needs a fresh start and new settlement. The question then arises: who will speak for Glasgow, challenge the current unsatisfactory state of affairs and present a new set of stories about the future?