The Real Glasgow Conspiracy

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Re: The Real Glasgow Conspiracy

Postby escotregen » Thu Oct 11, 2007 8:29 am

Sorry, but spending time on digging out that kind of thing is akin to those sad folks who,live their lives to prove the 'Diana conspiracy' :) Just as there are some Glaswegians who live their lives as 'victims' of some conspiracy or other. )I prefer the Glaswegians who just get out there and help change the world).

I think all you need do is re-read the chronology of what I posted - its all there and verifiable for anyone with the slightest familiarity on Glasgow history. The good Prof is so far out (or at least what is reported he said is so far out) that I've got a whole lot more interesting and fun things in the life to spend time on.
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Re: The Real Glasgow Conspiracy

Postby Peekay » Thu Oct 11, 2007 12:55 pm

escotregen wrote:I think that we need to be careful of falling backwards into the trap of the tendency for some Glaswegians to play the victimhood card.



I think Liverpool has taken the 'always the victim' title now anyway!

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Re: The Real Glasgow Conspiracy

Postby Sydney Rosewater » Thu Oct 11, 2007 4:33 pm

Peekay wrote:
escotregen wrote:I think that we need to be careful of falling backwards into the trap of the tendency for some Glaswegians to play the victimhood card.



I think Liverpool has taken the 'always the victim' title now anyway!

PK


Very constructive.
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Re: The Real Glasgow Conspiracy

Postby Dexter St. Clair » Thu Oct 11, 2007 10:26 pm

He was discredited here

on Wed Oct 03, 2007 9:01 pm
I think that we need to be careful of falling backwards into the trap of the tendency for some Glaswegians to play the victimhood card. The reason that the ‘conspiracy’ story petered out is because there is no evidence to support it. Earlier in the thread it was suggested there was evidence because:


and probably not anywhere else. We are not allowed to talk about Glasgow victims as it only applies to Fitba Fans but here's the latest victim
http://tinyurl.com/34l894

There are different interpretations of the facts and coincidences but there are plenty of non victims on here who believe that there was too much demolition in Glasgow, that if the New Towns had been reflected in more schemes like the pre war Knightswood Glasgow might have been a better place.
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Re: The Real Glasgow Conspiracy

Postby escotregen » Fri Oct 12, 2007 11:32 am

Cochrane I’d be grateful if you could read my postings properly before taking me to task :) You say that I said Prof Levitt was ‘discredited’ (your quotes). No I didn’t (for one thing, for all I know he’s bigger than me).

You stated that I “said in your last post that he was discredited”. I did not say that anywhere. I did state:

“The reason that the ‘conspiracy’ story petered out is because there is no evidence to support it.”

That’s a whole lot different from saying it was ‘discredited’… rather, as a theory, it just died all by itself for lack of evidence. This left it as the Prof’s personal ‘view’. Fair enough, but then, all I say is just look at the factual chronology I laid out above.

Anyway, can I say that if I'm finding myself going back over earlier postings to make corrections about subsequent responses… well, the ploy has then rather been lost. So I’ll leave this as my final contribution to this thread. If some folks want to stay in the conspiracy-victimhood thing, that’s of course entirely them.

(Dexter, I completely agree with you, we don’t need any conspiracy to agree there was far too much demolition in Glasgow (after all I spent a decade as a housing association trying to help rescue the remaining old tenement stock from the tender mercies of the municipal juggernaut and rehab them). We can now see that this well-intended mistake of area-clearance was as much a home-grown matter as anything to do with a conspiracy by ‘them up there’.
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Re: The Real Glasgow Conspiracy

Postby crusty_bint » Fri Oct 12, 2007 2:27 pm

Thats not patronising in the slightest.
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Re: The Real Glasgow Conspiracy

Postby Doorstop » Sat Oct 13, 2007 6:17 am

I agree with Cochrane. I've avidly devoured this thread ever since it appeared.

What we need is more empirical evidence, not chest thumping name calling.
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Re: The Real Glasgow Conspiracy

Postby Lucky Poet » Mon Oct 15, 2007 8:30 pm

I had a look for Professor Levitt's research online and had no luck either. The closest I could get was an article, 'New Towns, New Scotland, New Ideology, 1937-1957', in the Scottish Historical Review, vol 76, issue 2. It's from 1997, so a tad old for what you're all after, but the abstract gives the impression it might shed some light on Levitt's thinking, and maybe how he got onto his current work:

"Abstract : The Housing and Town Development (Scotland) Act of 1957 was designed to remedy the shortage of housing and lack of industrial development prospects which existed in 1937. As a solution, the Labour government elected in 1945 had favored new towns and a balanced modern industrial structure for Scotland, but defeat in 1951 sabotaged its plans. The new Conservative government eschewed the new town concept at first, preferring the expansion of local authority schemes and the rehousing of slum-dwellers within existing city boundaries. There were difficulties, however, particularly Labour's political strength in Scotland, the high unemployment rate, and the failure to attract major industry north of the border. The solution was the greater housing and industrial capacity of a new town, and a site was finally chosen at Cumbernauld. Despite their apparent copying of Labour policy, the Conservatives achieved the same end on a basis of market corporatism, including private industry and market-related rents."

Phew. Sadly back-issues of the SHS ain't online, even through my uni's system, so it looks like a trip to the library for some intrepid soul. Not me, I'm lazy as feck :D From what little I know about academia, it might be some time before that new research gets published, whether as an article or (hopefully) part of a book.
A few things occur to me: journalists love snappy (sensationalist) angles on stories, and our cash-strapped uni's like getting attention and the funding that sometimes comes with it. The unis (and their equally hungry departments) are more than happy to feed them tasty morsels. It may well be that when Levitt's work appears, it'll be rather less contentious :wink:
If I find anything more useful, I'll let ye know.

[edit] P.S. Levitt's written quite a few things on economic and social history, mainly 1850-1950-ish, and has edited some frightening sounding collections of papers from the old Scottish Office, and I dare say he knows his onions. I imagine he'd take more note of Scotty's kind of objections than the Hootsmon article suggests. That said, I also think escotregen has a point about looking for conspiracies, and the danger of enjoying victim status. I will now run away very fast like the big wuss I am 8O
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Re: The Real Glasgow Conspiracy

Postby Dexter St. Clair » Fri Jan 18, 2008 12:01 am

Victim Status is currently being transferred from Celtic supporters who always thought there was a conspiracy against them to Rangers supporters who know there's a conspiracy against them. Listen to any football phone in for examples.
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Re: The Real Glasgow Conspiracy

Postby Josef » Fri Jan 18, 2008 7:39 am

cochrane wrote:"Victim status" has been mentioned a few times — could you perhaps define what you mean in this context?


Image

"Infamy! Infamy! they've all got it in for me!"
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Re: The Real Glasgow Conspiracy

Postby conn75 » Fri Jan 18, 2008 9:37 am

I worked on this website, and while I didn't do any of the research nor have I read through all of it, the introduction to the Bruce Plan states:

The Corporation knew a powerful anti-Glasgow momentum in government planners and politicians existed. The Corporation knew powerful forces planned, in tackling the city’s problems, to reduce the city’s power and influence, to bring Glasgow down to the level of the rest of small town Scotland.

They knew the New Towns Act was coming. They had been banned from rebuilding within their pre-War boundaries.


Perhaps there's more in the site somewhere...

http://bestlaidschemes.com/essays/bruce/
http://www.whiskywhiskywhisky.com
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Re: The Real Glasgow Conspiracy

Postby Lucky Poet » Fri Jan 18, 2008 10:13 pm

Hey Cochrane, cheers for raising this again, I thought I'd managed to kill this thread stone dead :mrgreen:
Thinking back, I guess I meant exactly what Josef said, the point being it prejudices any research into this kind of subject. Which is not to say they didn't have it in for Glasgow... As you said a while back, best to try to have an open mind.
You're right by the way, Levitt's printed work seems to be like hens' teeth. It'll be good if we hear a bit more from him on this.
That stuff about the Bruce Plan is a good case in point too - all very interesting, but if I'd come out with statements like that my uni tutors would've kicked me up and down the street :D
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Re: The Real Glasgow Conspiracy

Postby crusty_bint » Fri Jan 18, 2008 10:31 pm

I find this subject extremely interesting not because I'm looking for an excuse or culprit for the problems that beset Glasgow in the post-war era but because I think it provides a really interesting insight into those times. To me and my generation, the turmoil of the early 20th century and the upheaval of the latter part is unimaginable. I can;t imagine what it would have been like to live through all that and how the political climate affected the break-up of the cash-cow empire but its certainly no great leap of the imagination to conclude that there might have been a plan, if not conspiracy, although perhaps just concerted effort to prop up London and (the south of) England at the expense of the provincial centres. The Red Clyde must have been a worrying prospect in the cold-war climate and I'm sure it was felt something had to be done to contain this, although saying 'contain' is somewhat of an oxymoron, as what actually happened was the dissolution of entire communities and the demolition of a huge area of the city.

The Bruce Plan is a fascinating, if horrifying thing. It shows on one hand the real desire to create something new, a new beginning from the old polluted, dark and dank Glasgow, but on the other just how narrow an escape the city had! A lecturer of mine told us once (this is obviously the abridged version) of when he was starting out as an architecture student in the 1960s, he saw this girl in the street crying on Renfrew St so he went to her and asked if she was ok. Turned out she was also a student, but from Sweden (I think) and was crying because she didn't want to be in this horrible dark dirty city, how it frightened her and how she longed for home. I always found it quite an emotive wee story and really brings home just what a hole Glasgow was in at the time and how its problems must have seemed insurmountable.

Anyway, good thread :)
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Re: The Real Glasgow Conspiracy

Postby Lucky Poet » Fri Jan 18, 2008 11:06 pm

A friend of mine grew up near London in the 60s, and she's told me her dad took her up to Glasgow at the time (I can't remember why). Said she'd never seen poverty like that before, and it scared the bejeezus out of her.

At the risk of wandering off-topic, but hopefully giving a bit of context, Edinburgh had an equivalent to the Bruce Plan drawn up not long after WWII, the Abercrombie Plan if I remember right. The idea was to 'modernise' the place by basically moving much of the city centre population out to peripheral housing schemes, and introducing urban motorways. A highlight was a motorway through Princes St Gardens, and another going from the top of Leith Walk, tunneling under Calton Hill and the top of the Canongate, before ploughing up the Pleasance. This would then connect with the inner ring road, planned to go through the Meadows on concrete stilts. I kid you not. Purely by coincidence, all the houses along the Pleasance route and others were found to be unfit for habitation and were pulled down. I've heard it said that the reason very little of this plan was carried out was that the Tories gained power in the local authority and were too tight with the cash to commit to such an extravagant scheme. So a large factor in all of this may be that Glasgow Corporation was just peculiarly committed to ideas like these.

Also, I spoke to a friend of my mum's a while back, in Dundee, and was bemoaning the demolition of the Wellgate, as is my wont. Dundee Corporation was well into its urban clearance, and flattened half the city centre. Turns out she'd been brought up in the Wellgate, and her abiding memory was of tiny flats with unsolvable rat infestation. I guess it's hard for us to get into the mindset of the time - what we see as urban desecration, they saw as getting well rid of crumbling liabilities...
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Re: The Real Glasgow Conspiracy

Postby maccoinnich » Sat Jan 19, 2008 12:29 pm

Until relatively recently, you could have followed the proposed route of this Edinburgh road scheme by following the gap sites. Within the last 10 or so years, the Omni Centre, the Bank of Scotland building in Tollcross, student housing on the Pleasance, etc, etc have all been built on sites that were cleared for that ludicrous scheme.

I believe it was also intended to cover over the Water of Leith. Wonderful, eh?
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