Squalor of the city ghetto in Sturgeon’s back yard
Slum landlords, ruthless crime gangs, mountains of rubbish and shocking levels of deprivation. No wonder those living in the Dickensian nightmare of Govanhill are so angry at the politician supposed to represent them
WOULD you want to tell people you grew up in this stair?’ asks Fiona Jordan, stepping into the gloom which lies beyond the tenement’s main door.
Graffiti scars the dulled ceramic tiles of the entrance hall, while loose electrical wires dangle from rotting ceiling beams. Stinking bin bags are piled high at the foot of its once immaculate stairway. The stench is overpowering.
Miss Jordan leads the way past cracked, stained front doors into the stairwell. The entrance to one of the flats on the ground floor has been sealed up with a metal barrier, while another appears to have taken several blows from a police battering ram.
Fresh air blows in as she opens the doorway to the back court, providing some respite from the smell of decay hanging in the air. But on closer inspection, the area is merely an extension of the block’s squalid interior – it is littered with broken glass, another pile of mouldering black bags and the yellowing remains of a rotting mattress.
It is difficult to picture this place ever having been a happy childhood home. Yet Miss Jordan’s childhood home in Allison Street is by no means the worst of its kind in Govanhill, the once proud working class neighbourhood she calls home but has now come reluctantly to refer to as a ‘ghetto’.
Some stairs are infested with rodents. Others strewn with human waste. In back courts, residents find themselves stepping over dirty nappies, used toilet tissue and dead mice which have been flung out of windows by their neighbours.
Unscrupulous landlords pack up to 18 people at once into two-bedroom flats. Security entry systems have been torn from the walls, allowing people to wander in and out of buildings as they please.
On the streets, pedestrians are forced to step over discarded furniture, fly-tipped rubbish, cardboard boxes and rusting electrical appliances.
On Allison Street, the odd estate agent, solicitor’s office, pub and traditional butcher now seem conspicuous among the dozens of Asian grocers, money transfer offices, mobile phone shops and shipping offices. The pavement is a slalom of head-high stacks of cardboard boxes and bin bags, while old vacuum cleaners and battered, threadbare sofas lie rotting outside stair doors.
Sizeable crowds of young men lean on metal barriers outside a fruit and vegetable shop, blocking the pavement altogether.
Outside a halal butcher’s shop, blood seeps out onto the pavement from a wheelie bin stuffed to the brim with chicken carcasses.
What confuses residents in Govanhill most is that these scenes of Dickensian squalor play out only yards away from the constituency office of Nicola Sturgeon, who on becoming First Minister promised to bring inequality and poverty into ‘sharp focus’.
THE evidence of a growing crisis in Govanhill is not merely anecdotal. Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation statistics show more than a quarter of the area’s population is income-deprived, almost four in ten adults have no qualifications and life expectancy for men is 70.5 – five years below the Scottish average.
Last year the area was fitted with state-ofthe-art CCTV cameras after fear of crime among residents reached fever pitch. In February, a 1,000-strong protest march took place after a 19-year-old woman was raped in Queen’s Park.
‘Some of the councillors and officials I speak to try to tell me that Govanhill was always like this. I grew up here and they are wrong,’ Miss Jordan said. ‘It was always a working class area but it was a proper community and never had the sort of problems we see now.’
She still lives in Govanhill, unlike many residents who packed up and left as it became a haven for mass immigration. Community police estimate 3,500 to 5,000 Roma are packed into a few streets alongside dozens of other nationalities.
Historically, Govanhill was Scotland’s Ellis Island, welcoming Irish, then Jewish immigrants, then Asians and Eastern Europeans.
But now the number of nationalities packed into this disjointed community can be counted by the dozen, a recent report revealing there are 53 languages spoken by the pupils in the local schools. It also emerged recently that English is the home language of only 4 per cent of pupils in Annette Street Primary.
What remains of the indigenous population has all but trickled out, often selling properties at a loss while migrant families move in.
Then there are the crime gangs. A BBC documentary tracked many victims of a people trafficking ring to addresses in Govanhill. The investigation found that Eastern European and Asian crime syndicates were working in tandem to traffic women into the country.
But despite the soaring numbers of immigrants in the area, few want to lay the blame for its woes entirely at the door of incomers.
Margo Uprichard, project leader at The Space, a community project set up by the Daughters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul, said a lack of basic literacy skills and a resignation to poor treatment have made the influx of Roma immigrants easy prey for rogue landlords and exploitative employers.
‘It’s important to bear in mind that these people have fled horrendous oppression in their own countries,’ she said. ‘They have a very fatalistic perception of life – until 100 years ago they were sold as part of the land in Hungary.
‘Their living standards would have been terrible, so even when they come here and find themselves in overcrowded flats you or I would consider unfit to live in, it seems like an improvement.
‘The one thing I would like The Space to do is to help them to be able to read and write. That way they’ll be able to get into the legal job market and out of the clutches of slum landlords and unscrupulous employers.’
For Miss Jordan, chronicling daily incidents online as part of her ‘Let’s Save Govanhill’ campaign has become less of a shaming exercise aimed at jolting Scotland’s political classes into action and more of a cry for help.
‘Nicola Sturgeon’s constituency – crime, vermin, filth, overcrowding, squalor,’ its leaflets cry.
‘Why is the Scottish Government not taking action to end the misery and squalor to be found in the Govanhill ghetto?’
The campaign has attracted more than 1,100 followers, mainly residents past and present, on Facebook. Faced with images of ‘waist-high rubbish’ piled up in a close, former resident Sharon MacKinnon wrote: ‘This area was my childhood home. It’s now a lawless, rat-infested ghetto. Rogue landlords play a big part, but so do the council who have placed a lot of people there who shouldn’t be.’
The campaign is a cry for help
that appears to have so far gone unheeded by Miss Sturgeon, whose constituency office sits five minutes’ walk away from such scenes
‘We have offered to take her on the Govanhill ghetto guided tour on numerous occasions,’ Miss Jordan said. ‘We are yet to be taken up on this offer.’
The Let’s Save Govanhill campaign even parked a bus outside the SNP conference in Glasgow last year, offering to take delegates on the ‘Govanhill Ghetto Tour’.
None took them up on the offer. It is this sense of abandonment by politicians of all ranks that jars the most with Govanhill’s residents.
Miss Jordan said: ‘Nobody is saying Nicola Sturgeon is completely to blame for the way Govanhill is. But she has the power to step in and do something about this.
‘She has a Housing and Local Government Minister and a Communities Minister she could bring to the table. That is within her power – local government is a devolved issue. But instead they’re happy to throw money at a housing association and a development trust. That way they are seen to be doing something.’
CURIOUSLY, the usually publicity-hungry First Minister’s constituency office – a church converted into business units – has no sign, plaque or party logo to suggest she has a presence in the area.
The growing cries of protest from within her own constituency have yet to stir Miss Sturgeon, who stated in 2014 that it was her ‘personal mission’ to alleviate ‘poverty and inequality’.
In 2015, another residents’ group took video footage of the filth and rubbish piled high on Allison Street and took it to Miss Sturgeon’s former office on Pollokshaws Road.
Conservative MSP Annie Wells, who represents the Glasgow region, has taken a tour of Govanhill. She said: ‘The community groups within Govanhill are dismayed by the lack of action by their constituency MSP.
‘After the shocking BBC documentary last week which highlighted the outrage of the human tragedy of human trafficking taking place in Govanhill, I asked the First Minister what action the Scottish Government was taking to address this serious crime and offer support for the victims.
‘The First Minister’s inaction in Govanhill has forced the creation of a cross-party group in the Scottish parliament – addressing the concerns which Nicola Sturgeon is simply ignoring.’
So what efforts have been made to improve the lot of Govanhill’s residents? Glasgow City Council can reel off a dizzying array of plans, schemes and measures that conjure up images of Govanhill being taken back, street by street.
The Govanhill task force regeneration action plan, approved by the council in 2012, promised to tackle issues with rogue landlords, fly-tipping, a lack of communal maintenance and overcrowding.
Four tenement blocks were given the dubious honour of becoming the only ‘enhanced enforcement zone’ in Scotland, allowing council officials to apply stricter rules to landlords to tackle overcrowding.
Then there is the Govanhill Acquisition and Repair Programme, a joint venture involving the council, Scottish Government and Govanhill Housing Association. Around 120 flats have been bought by the association, with the aim of wresting control of the factoring of communal closes.
A dedicated environmental health official has been posted to the area. A community hub has been established to allow residents to pass on their concerns. In excess of £40million, the council boasts, has been pledged into improving the housing in the area.
A Roma drop-in centre has been set up in a bid to bridge linguistic and cultural barriers.
Council officials insist that, over time, the area will slowly begin to rise from its knees.
But the question on most residents’ lips is why, if so much is being done to improve their lot, does their neighbourhood appear to be getting worse? This thick portfolio of long-term schemes, plans and measures, they feel, are a mere fig leaf to cover the deepening crisis unfolding before them.
‘We’ve got the council, the housing association and the community development trust all saying they’re in place to resolve these issues. That seems to be the stock answer whenever you raise your concerns to the council or to politicians,’ Miss Jordan said.
‘But none of them can spell out to me what outcomes they would consider to be a success. If these organisations can’t be clear about their purpose or aims, why are they receiving public money?
‘While these bodies are allowed to operate without providing evidence they are making a tangible difference, nothing will change.’
AGLASGOW City Council spokesman pointed to the ‘substantial sums’ of money being poured into the area, adding: ‘We are using the enhanced enforcement powers that are unique to Govanhill to drive out bad landlords.
‘Govanhill continues to receive enhanced services for bulk uplift, environmental health and pest control. We want to ensure property is properly managed so that many of the issues in the area can be tackled effectively.
‘We are building on the success of the acquisition programme and the enhanced enforcement area and extending these across the wider Govanhill area.
‘Along with a wide range of partners, we want to build a strong and cohesive community.’
A spokesman for Miss Sturgeon said: ‘The First Minister is closely engaged with issues in her constituency. She holds regular surgeries and meetings for local people about all of the issues in the area.
‘She has previously met Miss Jordan on a number of occasions to hear her concerns first-hand.
‘Govanhill, like many areas, faces specific challenges. It is important that all sections of the community are included and involved in addressing those challenges.’
The problem is now literally on Miss Sturgeon’s doorstep.
But it remains to be seen whether this will jolt the First Minister into taking a more hands-on approach towards solving the inherent social problems in her own back yard.