By Alex Robertson
Gerry Hassan’s piece the other day on Newsnet Scotland about the absent voters stirred up a swarm of responses which showed he had touched a raw nerve.
All the wriggling wiles of the Glasgow Labour Council would be comical if you didn’t realise that it is people’s lives they are playing games with to try to bolster their flagging electoral prospects.
For those who live in Scotland’s biggest city, it is a shame; they deserve so much more. Glasgow has so much to offer the rest of us in Scotland, and really doesn’t need the third rate council who have so abjectly failed to provide the leadership and support for all the enterprise, energy and talent that exists in that city.
Mr. Hassan highlights the endemic lack of trust, or even interest, in politicians to deliver among the Scottish people. Put that alongside the Glasgow Labour Party and you can see the connection. Who can be inspired to believe in better by the shambling seedy Labour Party in Glasgow? The Labour party, born in Scotland to defend and advance the rights and livelihoods of ordinary folk, has so dismally failed.
Look at the east-end of Glasgow, look at Labour mentality where self-preservation far outstrips advancing the people’s interest, and look at how the regeneration Glasgow so desperately needs has never been on Glasgow Labour’s to-do list, let alone their front burner. Glasgow badly needs to get over Labour. They have no original ideas, no positive proposals to make life better for Glaswegians in the most trying times since the Great Depression of the early 1930s.
What Glasgow needs is new ideas and a wholehearted unstinting commitment of its councillors to give good administration of the city’s affairs and out-of-the-box thinking to get all sorts of self-help projects started in the areas of youth employment, helping the old folk with improving their lives, their homes, their safety, providing support schemes to startup business which will employ people, stick to basics and be practical and competent.
I am a country boy by birth, but I studied in Glasgow and developed a deep affection for the city and people there. Now Glasgow people need councillors who care about the place and the people, who believe in better and are eager and impatient to give to the city what it needs to help itself.
Gerry Hassan highlighted the lack of belief among Scots in the ability of politicians to make a real difference, to trust them, or even to believe or hope in better. Barack Obama wrote a book before the last US Presidential Election, entitled “The Audacity of Hope”. Boy, does Glasgow need a dose of that right now. And it is very clear that Labour has nothing to offer in that regard.
The SNP have since 2007 set about showing by example what Scotland can do if its people are empowered, and slowly, for it takes time to change the attitudes of centuries, Scots are beginning to see the possibilities for making things better. Now it is time for Glasgow people to get over the failed Tammany Hall politics of old Labour and vote in a bunch of champions for Glasgow who have the ideas, and the energy, to turn Glasgow’s fortunes round.