Changing the Value System

“The government has made no secret of its determination to change the value system to focus more on individual responsibility, to place major limits on government support, and to pursue a single-minded, and some have claimed simple-minded, focus on getting people into employment at all costs. Many aspects of this program are legitimate matters for political contestation, but it is the mentality that has informed many of the reforms that has brought the most misery and wrought the most harm to the fabric of British society.

“I met with children in Glasgow’s North East, where, according to one local councillor, 48% of people are out of work, life expectancy is six years lower than the national average, about half of families are single-parent households, and about a third of households lack an internet connection.”

36 United Nations Special Rapporteur, Phillip Alston (2018)

The above quote is a rare example of official acknowledgment of the overarching costs of austerity to life and liberty in the UK Not only are the economic costs of austerity felt in the everyday expenditure of people across the country, but in many towns and cities it also carries with it a cultural narrative that has been shared for generations (Bramall, 2013). Policy in this sense reproduces culture, and in few cities is that as obvious as the city of Glasgow. As such, it is key to situate the debate around meaningful transitions within the contemporary socio-political situation in Glasgow and the UK more widely, a situation which has come to be intrinsically linked with austerity and the decline of working class communities as cohesive entities (Robertson, 1998).

Glasgow is a city steeped in industrial heritage which makes it an ideal location to study the deleterious effects of the post-industrial world in a time where economic austerity still shapes the political and social narrative (Damer, 1989; Law & Mooney, 2012; Macdonald et al 2014). Scotland as a whole has long been viewed as a site of this kind of research and oral histories with contributions from Knox (1999), Carstairs & Morris (1991), and Sridharan et al (2007) among the significant examples over the past half century that have detailed the effects of deindustrialisation and neglectful local policies on the urban Scottish

population. This particular deindustrialised environment has created a potent sense of identity and place, varying in its character from area to area within the city. Fraser (2013), when researching a group of young men in Glasgow prone to anti-social behaviour, referred to as the Langview boys, exemplified this when stating that territorialism has a long history in the city, rooted in persistent social divisions and economic marginalisation, which is only further intensified by the process of gentrification and globalisation that takes place in modern urban environments.

Areas like Easterhouse, Drumchapel, and Castlemilk in Glasgow experience unemployment rates well above the national average, and many of the schools in this study take their students from one or two of these areas. To put the concentration of deprivation into context, Glasgow in itself accounts for 47.5% of the top 10% of all people living in Scotland in severely deprived areas (Rae, 2012). Deprivation of this kind over time has left particular areas isolated as centres of decline with negative associations relating to deprivation eventually extending to those who have grown up within them. In Gray & Mooney’s (2011) research they argue that many of the most blighted parts of the city, in particular the East End, have

become subject to an ideological onslaught designed to justify low grade and flexible forms of employment, punitive workfare schemes, and upwards rent restructuring. In many cases the amenities and social hubs that once held these communities together outside of work have also begun to disappear leaving a distinct absence of cultural focal points. This process is similar to what Anderson (2005) found in his ethnographic

37 memoir of Jelly’s Place in Chicago, an old bar/off-license that closed due to investment being concentrated in other areas yet its heavily working class patrons kept returning to the place they had always met socially. Additionally, gentrification has begun to set in within some locales closer to the city centre, creating a clear pattern of displacement of poorer families (Waights, 2018) whilst failing to provide adequate alternative forms of employment for the pre-existing and immobile population.

Other scholars have remarked that urban change such as gentrification has in fact had advantages for the city, with new community focused developments such as the New Gorbals, where the input of local people has been taken into consideration when enacting urban renewal (Clark & Wright, 2018). Glasgow was an early UK adopter of what Harvey (1989:8) referred to as ‘urban entrepreneurialism’ a process that focuses on fostering local development and employment growth, with a particular emphasis on bringing people into work in the growing financial sector and service economy from outwith the major conurbation, often at the expense of those already living there, in particular the young population struggling to find their first full time job. This process has in turn stimulated economic growth within the city centre and its surrounding environs, but a much less clear picture of progress can be drawn from the largely residential areas outside the city’s inner circle (Gómez. 2002). Development of consumer capitalism has however according to Fraser et al (2017) seen a growth in the leisure opportunities available to young people creating a convergence between poorer communities and those better off within the city.

The transition from a heavily industrialised economy to a service sector economy, in line with similar transitions in other UK cities, has inevitably led to much of the same problems faced by post-industrial cities across the world. This change has in turn meant groups who were once relatively secure in their work formations have lost out in the push for development (Mooney & Danson, 1997). A process of economic and societal change which began in the 1980s has been described by some as creating a greater flexibility and satisfaction amongst the workforce (Wheatley, 2016; Fabian & Breunig, 2019), and others as producing a disempowered working class vulnerable to economic shocks (Rice, 2009; Davidson et al, 2010; Streeck, 2018).