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:
“Prof Levitt...has uncovered a continuous effort to discourage economic development in the city. He believes these policies paved the way for the problems of unemployment, bad health and poverty which blight areas of the city today and place several constituencies among the poorest in Europe."
If the good prof Levitt ‘believes these policies paved the way for the problems… etc…’ then he was well over half a century out. Glasgow’s problems of bad health and poverty were already infamous by the time of the 1880s. (Unemployment was little recorded or analyzed until well into the 20th century).
In fact the so-called post WW2 conspiracy was part of a continued endeavor by many parts of society to deal with the internationally infamous problems of Glasgow. The immense geographical concentrations of population in appalling tenements were seen by politicians, planners and residents alike as the major cause of ill health and poverty to be eradicated. Slum clearance, depopulation and rebuilding were believed to be one part of the ‘solution’.
But of equal importance was seen to be the need to relocate the jobs and therefore entice the population away from the city. I well remember growing up in Glasgow at the time when for many working folk their dream was to move to the ‘new towns and a new job’.
Another well-intentioned aspect of this social engineering was to try to stem the loss of emigration from Scotland by providing would-be emigrants with an equally attractive ‘new start’ in Scotland. At the other end of the spectrum, economic planners concluded (still rightly in my view) that throughout the developed world old industrial centres like Glasgow would fare badly in the emerging competition for large scale inward investment for the new technological and service industries – the early experiments with Industrial Estates such as Hillington and Queenslie had met with very limited, and expensive, success.
I would agree that there was one period of outright blatant attack on Glasgow’s political base. That was the damnable gerrymandering by the 1980s Tories led by Michael Forsyth – a particularly repugnant Tory Secretary of State with the attitude of “abolish everything, the market will solve everything… err, except when we need to stitch things up for our own ends…”
As for the earlier stuff it could be easy in hindsight to cry ‘conspiracy’ and ‘they had it in for Glasgow’. But in fact the politicians. Planners, social engineers at the time with their ultimately futile grand plans and ideas, were in tune with the population; including the population in Glasgow. Unsurprisingly, there were no Prof Levitts around at the time campaigning to stop what was seen as enlightenment and progress by just about everyone
at the time.
Today’s Glasgow and Glaswegians can do without the conspiracy stuff – they have done hugely well in reinventing the city to meet what the real world is like (and please, no crap about ‘aye but its no real jobs’). The acute and seemingly worsening problems of health and wealth inequalities are the immediate problems for Glasgow to tackle, not some conspiracy to do the city down; but even these inequalities are, to an extent, part of the costs of overall growing wealth. Another feature about these inequalities we could argue about is the extent to which they are self-generated by parts of the city community that long ago lost it cultural and social way in the period of de-industrialization.
Anyway, I’ll stop there as I think I better be brief