In investigating the nature of meaningful work from a class based perspective in Glasgow the prevalence of poverty cannot be ignored. The lengthy history of Glasgow as an industrial and maritime powerhouse has brought with it a legacy of deprivation and inequality that continues to this day. Glasgow remains the most deprived city and local authority area in Scotland (Eisenstadt, 2016). Almost half (47%) of Glasgow’s residents, 292,000 people, reside in the 20% of most deprived areas in Scotland. In contrast, only 27,000 people (4.4% of the population) live in the 10% of least deprived areas in Scotland (SIMD, 2016). More than a third of of all children in the city (34%) were estimated to be living in poverty in 2017 (SHS, 2018). In 2016, 19% of children lived in workless households, 6.5% higher than the Scottish average (Eisenstadt, 2016).The reality of life for many individuals in the most deprived areas of a city which has long struggled to adapt to the fluctuations of capitalism without abandoning the people who built its legacy and history is often fraught with complex and numerous difficulties. This is clearly shown in research which evidences that Glasgow’s richer environs have, like much of the UK, grown further apart from the areas of the city with much lower average incomes to the point of almost being segregated in all but name, often with a suburbanising effect of pushing the poorest out of the city centre entirely (Bailey et al, 2016; Bailey & Minton, 2017; Kay & Trevena, 2019).
41 In February 2002, then Conservative Party leader Iain Duncan Smith (later to be Work and Pensions
Secretary in the Cameron UK government 2010-2016) visited Easterhouse in the East End of Glasgow, one of the poorest urban districts in the entire United Kingdom. Reflecting on this visit Duncan Smith later said:
“Standing in the middle of an estate like Easterhouse, you know it was built after the war for a purpose, only to see this wrecked and dreadful set‐up today, with families locked into generational breakdown, poverty, drug addiction and so on. And that really does confront you with the thought that we did this—we built the brave new world, and look where it's gone. It was a sort of Damascene point. It's not that I wasn't thinking about these things before, but after Easterhouse I saw that we had to do something about it” (cited
in Derbyshire, 2010).
Rather than reflecting a new desire to redress the imbalances of decades of neoliberal decline Duncan Smith’s Damascene conversion reflected more of a reflection on messaging and a realisation that the political right had to modernise, expressing a similar rationale to that cited by advocates of compassionate conservatism (Bednarek, 2011; Bochel & Powell, 2018). Yet in doing so he belied an understanding that is shared by many residents of the city as well, particularly in areas such as Easterhouse, that of sustained and often deliberately enacted urban decline (Andrews, 2018). These narratives of decline, blight and decay play a central role in the stigmatisation of the local population, passing on through generations a
perception of diminished self-worth (Gray & Mooney, 2011). Duncan-Smith’s targeted language also sought to appeal to an often ignored group of people from working class communities that evidence a clear antipathy towards social security benefits (Shildrick & MacDonald, 2013; Taylor-Gooby, 2016; Kevins et al, 2018), a dichotomy that is at the heart of the narrative of decline in such communities in Glasgow.
Glasgow is not a new site for such experimental political observation, having regularly been a stop off for politicians and commentators of all varieties, often in a sort of poverty tourism that is regularly enacted by those studying and judging from above opining on so-called welfare culture and benefit dependency across the UK (Brown, 2017; Macdonald et al, 2014, Shildrick, 2018). The city’s problems have risen and fallen with fluctuations in the perceived success of British capitalism, and it has often been a city in which the worst vagaries of economic depression can be seen. In his essay ‘Why Are the Many Poor?’ Townsend (1984:2) noted how this process enacts on such areas:
‘Let the least depression take place in the labour market, and the worker is pitted against his fellow. The poverty of one is underbid by the greater need of another; and the competition for work reduces the highest wage of some and the lowest wage of all occupations to a pittance just above the starvation point, at which the least failure of health or work leads to pauperism.’
42 Research by MacLeod et al (2018) on foodbank use in deprived communities within Glasgow found that this sense of regressive competition had permeated in particular groups of young men and those suffering from mental health problems, they found that the individuals frequenting foodbanks were those suffering the most acute impacts of austerity. People suffering in this way have often been attacked rather than helped, as was the case with Duncan Smith’s visit when he used the language of Broken Britain to describe people struggling to get by (Hayton, 2012). Targeted narratives of this kind have come to define many major inner city urban areas across the UK, a narrative particularly reinforced by the normalisation of poverty that pervades the media and increasingly even entertainment (Blackman & Rogers, 2017). The effect this has on young people who have grown up with little else is relatively unknown, but there is evidence to suggest that some of these messages are being internalised and as a consequence altering perceptions of what sort of jobs and roles working class people should play in society (Tyler, 2008; Hanley, 2017).
As Attree (2006) elucidated, the costs of poverty are not only material but profoundly social. Many poorer children experience a gradual narrowing of their horizons in both a social and economic sense. Social costs due to poverty are pervasive and are often exchanged from one generation to the next in a form of reverse aspiration. Contextual prejudice of this kind appears to particularly affect young males, whose work
practices are still fetishised by elements of prominent working class culture and indeed politics, as Furlong et al (1996) found in their analysis of the Scottish Young People’s Surveys. These same young males are repeatedly the focus of Broken Britain narratives in regards crime and deviance, thereby systematically impoverishing and worsening the social and economic conditions of people already mired in poverty without asking why they have ended up on that path (Kingston & Webster, 2015). As MacDonald and Shildrick (2007; 2010) found through longitudinal research on Teesside this often stems from a disaffection with school that hardens into disengagement and persistent truancy, from there developing into petty crime and anti-social behaviour, leading to negative experiences and impressions of the criminal justice system as a result.
Where once full employment was one of the ultimate goals of social policy it appears now that even work does not provide a guaranteed route out of poverty in the UK where two-thirds of children growing up in poverty live in a family where at least one family member works (DWP, 2013). This has given rise to the aforementioned claim by senior UK political figures including Tony Blair, Iain Duncan Smith and Gordon Brown of a passed on culture of worklessness, most recently by then Minister for Employment Chris
Grayling in 2011 that ‘there are four generations of families where no-one has ever had a job’ in some parts of the country (Hern, 2012). This claim has been evidenced to be a vast exaggeration if not entirely non- existent by MacDonald et al (2014) who attempted to interview 20 families within which at least one family member across three generations had never had a job and had left education in Parkhill, Glasgow, with a
43 worklessness rate of 38.1% in 2010, and East Kelby, Middlesbrough, with worklessness rate of 30.6% in 2010, both well above the national averages for England and Scotland of 12.4% and 14.6% respectively. Over a lengthy period and different sampling techniques they found it impossible to identify any families that met this criteria. When loosening their criteria to more simply include families that had known long periods of worklessness over two generations they also had great difficulty as two generation workless families account for less than half of one per cent of all workless households in the UK (Gaffney, 2010). The results of the interviews they did attain clearly show that the idea of a culture of worklessness is flawed and any persistence of this problem is a result of broader structural factors that warrants further investigation in a context where austerity has become normalised. The insistence on making these claims in the public sphere is an example of what the researchers call a ‘zombie argument’, completely resistant to evidence and social scientific attempts to kill them off (MacDonald et al 2014:217).
Areas of Glasgow, perceived to be dangerous and to some deviant, are known for embracing their
supposedly negative tags, in particular the image of the hard man, a regular trope of cultural depictions of the traditionally working class parts of the city (McKinlay, 1991; Johnston & McIvor, 2004). Areas such as this are what Damer (1974:221), borrowing from Walters (1972) refers to as ‘dreadful enclosures’, in his paper on the working class estate of Wine Alley (Moorepark) in Govan:
“The deviant status of these dreadful enclosures has been recognised in the literature and indeed their very names often signify the essence of their horrendous features: Hell’s Kitchen, Back o’ the Yards, The Jungle, The Cage, and so on. It hardly needs repeating that the population of these neighbourhoods is also regarded as deviant in some sense or another; thus we have ghetto dwellers, slum rats, the lumpenproletariat, the ‘rough’ or ‘lower’ working class, and Matza’s term the ‘disreputable poor’. The remarkable persistence of these localities has been noted by urban sociologists; indeed it could be said that there has been an institutionalisation of inequities in certain localities in our cities. While the population housed in these disadvantaged localities suffers from the structural constraints of a capitalist housing market, they can also suffer from the very reputation of the outside world towards them.”
This reputational association with poverty and the harsh realities of a life spent without material riches however is not one that necessarily leads to either a sense of being downtrodden or indeed sympathy for liberationist perspective. In Jost’s (2017) analysis of qualitative and quantitative research he found that often working class participants expressed views that are inherently conservative whilst defining them personally as not being such, this in turn calls into question our tendency to match convenient political labels onto the views of individuals deriving their points from lived experience. The cultural trend towards social conservatism of working class communities whilst maintaining a relatively social-democratic
44 Social conservatism has altered and influenced the kind of policies many working class communities
support, with the traditional left-right axis becoming less important in the face of predominant social values (Swales, 2016). In such inner city urban areas the assumed predominance of liberal ‘identity politics’ among those under 30 is much diminished by the pressing material concerns of austerity, shaped rather in the shared cultural understanding of being outsiders to a system that has forgotten them (Cohen, 2017). According to Slater (2012) this is a result of a deliberately manufactured ignorance designed to prevent people looking at the structural causes of their condition.
Glasgow itself has a long and abundant history of outsider resistance to and being the testing ground for neoliberal economic and social policies, including the beginnings of the Poll Tax protests in 1989 (Lavalette & Mooney, 1990; Bagguley, 1995) and the gentrification of large working class areas to become the European Capital of Culture in 1990 (Mooney, 2004; Garcia, 2005) as well as hosting the 2014
Commonwealth Games (Paton et al, 2012). As a location once referred to as the second city of the Empire it is an urban environment strewn with allusions to grandeur, yet also the decline of modern Britain itself – perhaps best exemplified by the 2014 vote within the city of 53.49 per cent to leave the United Kingdom (Whigham, 2017). Among many other historical and cultural drivers, this is reflective of a kind of populist resistance to the idea that Glasgow is a city with no future abandoned by central government, an
experience felt in many post-industrial cities in the UK such as Liverpool and Newport (Rodriguez-Pose, 2018). Other writers have remarked on the exaggerated nature of these assumptions, deeming Glasgow to have embraced the same wealth focused policy reforms as most major European cities and adopted new class formations that exclude traditional working class communities (MacLeod, 2002; Shaker & Rath, 2019).
Glasgow has historically been more vulnerable to socioeconomic and political upheaval than other Scottish cities, and indeed many cities across the UK (Collins and Levitt, 2016). Over time this has led to worse outcomes for young people who grow up within its confines when transitioning from school to work (McKinney et al, 2012). Particular vulnerabilities of this kind is the result of a series of historical factors and decisions, most notably policy responses to overcrowding, including the post-war desire to relocate supposedly upwardly mobile working class families outside of the city into new towns like Cumbernauld, East Kilbride, and Irvine (Allan, 1965; Walsh et al, 2017), thereby creating a left behind working class deemed suitable for what were until relatively recently classified by some as slums (Damer, 2018). A facet of life the author William McIlvanney (cited in Damer, 2018) referenced in his book Laidlaw (2013:32):
“And what’s there? Hardly anything but houses, just architectural dumps where they unloaded people like slurry. Penal architecture. Glasgow folk have to be nice people. Otherwise, they would have burned the place to the ground ages ago.”
45 In Ferguson & Cunnison’s 1950s study of Glasgow boys serving as the key wage earners in their household a sense of desperation was writ large with participants reporting having to leave jobs early due to repeated absence from sickness caused by the conditions of their living (1951). These findings led to a slew of research which inadvertently problematised the concept of the inner city in Glasgow (Andrews, 2018) and led to policy reforms with varying degrees of success in response. Though the city has changed rapidly, and extensive redevelopment has taken place, it remains that newly clad towers and bicycle rentals have not washed away the effects of austerity on the population at large, and in turn have severely damaged the health, leisure and educational prospects of young people in Glasgow (McKendrick et al, 2016; Batchelor et al, 2017). Epidemiological problems of this kind are best understood in the presence of the much debated Glasgow effect (Reid, 2011) a controversial set of data which suggests in particular areas of the city the effect of various factors on health have led to life expectancies that are some of the lowest in Europe. Walsh (2016a) however has deemed this term inappropriate and designed to single out what is a universal problem of the link between poverty and ill health, one that is particularly potent in Glasgow due to a string of poorly thought out political, economic, and environmental decisions.