Politics

Scottish Review : Kenneth Roy’s east end

kreast-end 6 January 2009

Scottish Review : Kenneth Roy’s east end - Scottish Review article by Scottish Review

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I looked up at the sky. It was big. I looked all around me. It appeared to be safe. The streets were wide and the houses modern, trim, suburban-respectable. One had far too many garden gnomes – as scary in large numbers as drug-crazed welfare dependents with two heads. With my usual facility for failing to spot the story, I had ended up in the wrong Easterhouse. I might as well have gone to Prestwick.

There had not been much sign of political activity earlier in the day. The most numerous street posters belonged to the SNP and Labour – Labour perhaps slightly ahead, these arch enemies often clinging to the same lamp-posts, above or below according to who had got there first – with the Scottish Conservatives and Unionists trailing in third place and the Lib Dems almost invisible. This could be the final result and, if it is, remember you read it here first. Yet in all my many hours trudging round the constituency, I didn’t spot a single canvasser.
     Here in Easterhouse, not far from Next but closer to Haddow’s, was a Solidarity stand. I accepted their leaflet and was greeted like a long-lost socialist brother by a gutsy, talkative woman who announced herself as Tommy Sheridan’s mum.
     ‘You’ll have heard that Gail’s in the clear?’
     ‘Ah, no.’
     ‘It’s on the front page of the Record. She starts work again in a fortnight.’
     ‘Great. How’s Tommy?’
     ‘He’s fine – despite this perjury rubbish.’
     Tommy isn’t standing this time, except in the dock in due course. He is represented in Glasgow East by Trisha, who has lived in Shettleston for 25 years – I have Mrs Sheridan’s word for that. I said to her that Trisha looked young (by which I meant young and attractive) and Mrs Sheridan replied with mock envy that the lovely Trisha had no right to look so young.
     ‘How do you think you’re going to do in the by-election?’, I asked.
     ‘I think we’re going to get a good vote,’ she said, which I took to mean that Solidarity stood no chance whatsoever. ‘I mean, Labour’s been in power for years here and what have they done for Easterhouse? Look at the state of the place.’
     I hesitated to mention the profusion of garden gnomes and the possible implications for the future of the class struggle.

I had a pit-stop at the Healthy Eating Centre in Parkhead, not, as it sounds, one of the great oxymorons of our time, but a modern cafe offering life-saving smoothies to bemused journalists. It was so wholesome that it made me long for a seriously squalid little pub, of which there is no shortage in Glasgow East. I found one easily enough – you simply walk 10 yards in any direction – but it was not decadent enough for my taste; it was a cosy snug and unlike most pubs in the district it was unashamedly agnostic.

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