Council shows true colours in bid to axe Citizens Advice

FOR most people struggling with a wicked combination of problems around mental health, addiction, employment and housing, there aren’t many places to turn.

And as the economic devastation left in the wake of the pandemic further materialises, things are about to get a whole lot worse.

Covid-19 simply accelerated a process, the wheels of which have been in motion for decades, of permanent social, cultural and political decay. Cheery stuff, I’m sure you agree. I was therefore utterly unsurprised this week to learn that Glasgow City Council, in its famously finite wisdom, was considering celebrating the Citizens Advice Bureaux’s 81st birthday – by closing down five of its offices in some of the city’s most challenged communities.

I thought being threatened with court action by a homelessness charity last year for repeated and illegal failure to accommodate rough sleepers was rock bottom enough.

But what better way to consummate the coming moral apocalypse, stoking suspicions there is little ideological daylight between the SNP and the Tories, than defunding the only remaining means by which Glasgow’s poorest might wrest themselves from the turgid and toxic quicksand people often sarcastically refer to as “the economy”.

What could possibly demonstrate Scotland’s moral muscularity more capably than its most managerially bloated, clerically incompetent and statutorily delinquent local authority launching yet another full-frontal assault on its poorest, most destitute and vulnerable citizens.

As the inevitable backlash to the proposed cuts gathered pace earlier this week, Glasgow City Council, as if by magic, produced £4million to purchase a quick escape from the public relations disaster – a quick change of heart that did not come sudden enough.

While £4million is a considerable sum, it barely touches the sides of Glasgow’s ever expanding social dysfunction. One wonders how any serious person could contemplate defunding essential advice services and law centres in the first place.

In this 180-degree political pirouette – performed in abnormally rapid fashion by arguably Scotland’s most decrepit and bovine institution – we see how human life is increasingly traded as political currency by public institutions not only running low on cash, but also dangerously out of ideas.

How fortified from social reality must you be to contemplate such an aggressive act of social stupidity as closing services that offer lifelines to the desperate? In these gravest of times, such services ought to be expanded, not cut.

Yet the council, in the latest public exhibition of its institutional brass neck, seemingly regards advice services, like CABs and law centres, as mere beads on the political abacus.

The same people who rightly regard “Tory cuts” as a singular evil will launch into a wonderful synchronised performance of political gymnastics to painstakingly outline how “different”, “complex” and “difficult” cuts proposed by the SNP are.

While such ethical elasticity is a joy to observe, it doesn’t quite beat the sight of embittered former Labour councillors who, of course, catalysed the social death spiral Glasgow now finds itself dizzily descending, engaging in their own special brand of wilful self-delusion.

In truth, these cuts have been widely known about in various sectors for about 12 months.

Glasgow City Council has chosen to announce them at the last minute, in a cynical attempt to minimise the political fall-out and weaken whatever resistance to its plans that can be cobbled together before councillors vote on the proposals.

Convenient, given many of the services at risk are now the only means by which the downtrodden, utterly brutalised by every level of government in the UK and Scotland, have any chance of holding them to account.

Good luck trying to get away with it – you bunch of absolute shysters.