BS: Glasgow: doing fine compared with Malawi

Subject: BS: Glasgow: doing fine compared with Malawi
From: Jack Campin
Date: 01 Nov 10 - 08:45 PM

Article translated from Le Monde Diplomatique:

Julien Brygo on present-day Glasgow

Subject: RE: BS: Glasgow: doing fine compared with Malawi
From: akenaton
Date: 02 Nov 10 - 05:11 AM

Very interesting article Jack.

Haven't had to digest it properly, but I've bookmarked the publication.

Subject: RE: BS: Glasgow: doing fine compared with Malawi
From: John MacKenzie
Date: 02 Nov 10 - 06:52 AM

I was born in Glasgow, and in a way, it would appear from that article, that nothing much has changed in the intervening 67 years!
It's depressing, and the most depressing part is that the man in the last section is still blaming Margaret Thatcher. FFS, Stewart & Lloyds moved with a large chunk of their workforce, to Corby, in about 1938. Why doesn't he blame them for starting the decline?
No, it's the same lame cry, as they sit in their ghettoes, BLAME MAGGIE.
If you're not intelligent enough to put the blame where it belongs, then maybe you deserve your lot.
Blame the EEC, blame their Iron and Steel policies, their anti pollution legislation, that along with cheap coal imports, ruined the coal industry. Or would they rather have the mines back, along with the smog and the silicosis?
Glasgow is a conundrum, it contains some of the nicest and kindest people on this earth, yet it is home to a sort of third world mentality of hopelessness, and poverty.
There may even be some people who still keep their coal in the bath!

Subject: RE: BS: Glasgow: doing fine compared with Malawi
From: Crow Sister (off with the fairies)
Date: 02 Nov 10 - 07:07 AM

I've always wondered how the assertion that a family eating takeaways is somehow cheaper than eating regular food, can be true? My Mum was a single parent on benefits and she could hardly ever afford fish and chips for us. It was boiled potatoes, frozen peas and fish-fingers, or boiled potatoes, frozen broad beans and sausages, or boiled potatoes, peas and mince & gravy (not a lot of variety, but then she wasn't really 'into' cooking).

Cultural habits I can certainly buy, because it doesn't take long for simple skills like cooking to be lost if you don't learn them at home. My Mum didn't teach me to cook anything because she preferred to get on with things herself (it was quicker) and I remember lots of textbooks in 'Home Economics', so I guess basic cooking skills could have bypassed me. I wonder if my Nan hadn't taught me to bake cakes as a kid, if I'd have been confident enough to teach myself to cook in my teens.

Subject: RE: BS: Glasgow: doing fine compared with Malawi
From: bankley
Date: 02 Nov 10 - 08:51 AM

a few years ago my buddy, Eddie sang out about the rampant heroin use there. Some dealers tried to silence him with their knives. He was stabbed multiple times and left for dead. He pulled through, went to Belgium to recover. When he returned to Glasgow, they tried again. He's okay, still lives there, still playing and singing.. I intend to visit next year..
You can hear him on Murdoch's last CD, among others.
He wrote a fine song about that whole experience

"I'd rather be a dead man walking, but at least I'm off my knees
I'd rather go out rocking than to go down by degrees"

Subject: RE: BS: Glasgow: doing fine compared with Malawi
From: GUEST,Alan Whittle
Date: 02 Nov 10 - 03:56 PM

John -I don't know why Thatcher doesn't bother you. if i were Scottish, I'd be pissed off that Cameron was starting his programme of cuts off in Scotland and Burnley - places where he has no real mandate to rule. just like Thatcher started off the poll tax in Scotland. History repeats itself.

What really used to piss me off about Thatcher was that if you talked to people in safe Tory seats, they'd say - recession -what recession.

Certainly there was never an attack on the manufacturing communities like it - before or since. 28% of manufacturing industry destroyed in a period of twelve months. And within a short time - hard drugs for sale on every street corner, homeless begging on the street.

Then there was the sectarian business. thatch and tebbit saying as many inflamatory things as they could manage. Did that not bother you?

i always loved your country ever since I got to study for two years with the late Arthur Marwick when he was head of history at the Open University. I did summer schools in stirling.

The Thatcher years were the most determined and sustained effort to shit on Scotland since the Highland Clearances. you obviously feel different. I don't get it.

Subject: RE: BS: Glasgow: doing fine compared with Malawi
From: John MacKenzie
Date: 02 Nov 10 - 04:42 PM

I agree that she wasn't good for Scotland, or anywhere else for that matter.
What I get pissed off by, is the mental laziness that uses her, or anything else for that matter, as a scapegoat for ALL ills.
There is no one thing that causes all ills, just as there is no one thing that will cure them.
It's a cross between being pathetic, and being apathetic.

Subject: RE: BS: Glasgow: doing fine compared with Malawi
From: akenaton
Date: 02 Nov 10 - 05:26 PM

"There is no one thing that causes all ills, just as there is no one thing that will cure them."

Oh yes there is!

Subject: RE: BS: Glasgow: doing fine compared with Malawi
From: John MacKenzie
Date: 02 Nov 10 - 06:00 PM

Yet leave you still alive? :)

Subject: RE: BS: Glasgow: doing fine compared with Malawi
From: akenaton
Date: 02 Nov 10 - 06:17 PM

I shall be "El Comandante" :0)

An' Eck's gonnae be "Che"