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So, Glasgow Corporation, if you will forgive the anachronism, is to demolish the Blackhill housing "scheme". A certain similarity comes to mind with American disenchantment over strategic hamlets in Vietnam. For this scorched-earth policy has nothing to do with the architectural soundness of Blackhill's housing stock. It is a purely political move; a cynical calculation that the explosive social problems festering in the post-war housing schemes can be papered over by razing the houses and dispersing the population.
I spent the years between five and twenty in a Glasgow scheme: Drumchapel. The schemes were a post-war phenomenon. Frightened by the massive swing to Labour in the 1945 election, the British ruling class and their Labour lieutenants doled out reform. The Glasgow slums would be demolished. In their place rose the "schemes": Drumchapel, Easterhouse, Blackhill, Castlemilk.
These schemes were to prove a doubleedged reform. Inside toilets were traded for a dispersal of the closely-knit working class communities of Clydeside. The working class families were dispatched to isolated brick hamlets where they were easier to contain, while Labour councillors grew corrupt on the building contracts. In other places the "schemes" would have been called for what they were: ghettos.
From Drumchapel it took an hour's bus
ride to reach the comparative civilisation of the city centre; a long way to go after a day's work. Drumchapel had no pubs, cinema, bingo hall or restaurant in all the fifteen years I grew up in it. After the first ten years, they did build one cafe and a swimming pool, shared between 60,000 people. All this had an effect if not a purpose: to create a rootless, atomised workforce. And where failing capitalism cannot provide jobs, a lumpen proletariat.
Into the schemes were introduced instruments designed to ensure the working class did not reunite. Chief among these was the School.
My teachers compared unfavourably with U.S. Peace Corps volunteers in South Vietnamese villages. They were alien, middle class and only too anxious to leave the scheme at 4 o'clock. Their philosophy was to "help the cream"; pupils were streamed according to imputed academic ability, and attention lavished on those designated the most able. I was informed by my teachers that the majority of the 1500 school students were already a lost cause and fit for nothing but facotry fodder. I remember repeated warnings never to go into teaching; I would only end up having to waste time on the dross.
The factory fodder were kept at their desks by means of that infamous Scottish institution, the belt. I was subsequently to learn, years later, that much of the power of the right wing in the E.I.S., the major
teachers' union, rests on their terrorising the average class teacher into believing that without the belt the schools in the schemes will be like those in New York!
In gratitude for championing this "defence" against the pupils, the right wing is constantly re-elected. As in Vietnam, democracy and civil rights have to be "suspended" to counter the supposed meance. and, not surprisingly, the masses reply in kind. I myself was belted on a number of occasions. In the Calvinist ethic pain is conducive to good learning.
The repressive violence just beneath the surface was manifested in another permanent feature of the scheme, the Glasgow police. They patrolled constantly in twos and threes in gaunt-looking Land Rovers, peering out inscrutably through the wire mesh on the windows. Only years later, in the Catholic ghettos of Belfast watching the R.U.C., did I realise that middle-class housing estates are not patrolled day in, day out, by cop cars endlessly cruising at five miles per hour.
The job of the scheme and the school was well done. I was "streamed". I went to university, where I met the middle class of my own age for the first time. They asked where I cam from. I told them. "But of course", they would reply, "you mean the Old Village... not that scheme?" I told them all to fuck off. I hope the people of Blackhill do the same.
GEORGE KEREVAN