Glasgow East: Blasted by the past?

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Glasgow East: Blasted by the past?

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They've been talking about poverty in Glasgow for a long time. They've been into land reform as well. Not just the work of Mary Barbour and the Glasgow Women's Housing Association and rent strikes during the first war, but at the turn of the twentieth century Glasgow was also the de facto HQ in Britain of the Single Tax movement, those followers of Henry George's idea of taxing land values. The poverty in the city was legendary, and it was it seems often used as an example by either side in the land tax debates almost exactly a century ago.

Here's a response from Winston Churchill in the House of Commons to the leader of the opposition, Arthur Balfour's attempts to rubbish the idea:

The Glasgow Example - I do not think the Leader of the Opposition could
have chosen a more unfortunate example than Glasgow. He said that the
demand of that great community for land was for not more than forty
acres a year. Is that the only demand of the people of Glasgow for
land? Does that really represent the complete economic and natural
demand for the amount of land a population of that size requires to
live on? I will admit that at present prices it may be all that they
can afford to purchase in the course of a year. But there are one
hundred and twenty thousand persons in Glasgow who are living in
one-room tenements; and we are told that the utmost land those people
can absorb economically and naturally is forty acres a year.

What is the explanation? Because the population is congested in the
city the price of land is high upon the suburbs, and because the price
of land is high upon the suburbs the population must remain congested
within the city. That is the position which we are complacently assured
is in accordance with the principles which have hitherto dominated
civilised society.

The "Poor Widow" Bogey - But when we seek to rectify this system, to
break down this unnatural and vicious circle, to interrupt this
sequence of unsatisfactory reactions, what happens? We are not
confronted with any great argument on behalf of the owner. Something
else is put forward, and it is always put forward in these cases to
shield the actual landowner or the actual capitalist from the logic of
the argument or from the force of a Parliamentary movement.

Sometimes it is the widow. But that personality has been used to
exhaustion. It would be sweating in the cruellest sense of the word,
overtime of the grossest description, to bring the widow out again so
soon. She must have a rest for a bit; so instead of the widow we have
the market-gardener - the market-gardener liable to be disturbed on the
outskirts of great cities, if the population of those cities expands,
if the area which they require for their health and daily life should
become larger than it is at present.

What is the position disclosed by the argument? On the one hand, we
have one hundred and twenty thousand persons in Glasgow occupying
one-room tenements; on the other, the land of Scotland. Between the two
stands the market-gardener, and we are solemnly invited, for the sake
of the market-gardener, to keep that great population congested within
limits that are unnatural and restricted to an annual supply of land
which can bear no relation whatever to their physical, social, and
economic needs - and all for the sake of the market-gardener, who can
perfectly well move farther out as the city spreads and who would not
really be in the least injured.

One hundred years ago, the Liberal Party could have begun to eradicate Glasgow's poverty once and for all. How sad that a hundred years later Glasgow East continues to shine mostly as an example of those same problems we could have solved all those years ago. What benefit has the political game been to them in all those years? What good the franchise? What good socialism? Or the vested interests of the Tories' friends? BBC News tonight suggested that this might be the most important by-election in thirty years. Maybe for the first time in a century someone could once again explain how they are going to make life really better for the constituency's long suffering inhabitants. And then make it happen.

Henry George

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Comments

Submitted by Mark Wadsworth (not verified) on July 8, 2008 - 19:08.

... the Hallowed Green Belt!

Submitted by Jock on July 8, 2008 - 23:07.

Of course in them days Glasgow didn't have such restrictive planning, just greedy landlords refusing to sell until their land ripened.

Submitted by James Graham (not verified) on July 11, 2008 - 10:14.

Thanks for that quote. I wasn't aware that Churchill was as plagued by the "poor widow" argument as much as we are today. His irritation comes across quite clearly.

Submitted by Jock on July 11, 2008 - 20:54.

Would you believe it, I must have read that passage dozens of times and never really clicked that it was the same "poor widow" as we hear about so frequently today! The "market gardener" idea put me of the scent - I always thought it was some comment about housing versus food production!

God I can be stupid sometimes!