SELFIES AND SPITE IN THE SOUTHSIDE SHOWDOWN
Take a ringside seat for two sparring leaders, a fading champ...and his former cornerman
THE party leaders’ morning appointments took place barely a mile apart – yet in entirely different worlds. Nicola Sturgeon, faintly regal in her buttoned SNP-yellow coat and matching brolly, chose Annette Street Primary School in Govanhill as her Glasgow Southside landing place.
It is probably the most ethnically diverse primary in the land – so diverse that it cannot cope with all the languages on the go, with the result that some pupils have to act as unofficial translators for their classmates.
Govanhill, meanwhile, is known for poverty – for rogue landlords, uncollected rubbish piling high in back courts, rat infestations, tenement flats so overcrowded that some have to sleep in shifts, and for widespread anger that the constituency MSP, one Nicola Sturgeon, has not done more about all of the above.
Outside Annette Street Primary, it was all smiles, but several on social media said she had a nerve showing up there at all.
A mile away in Pollokshields, land of detached, six-bedroom piles with his ’n’ hers Range Rovers parked in the drive, local boy Anas Sarwar made the short walk through the sumptuousness to vote.
But while his casual attire may have carried a certain man of the people appeal, it also seemed to telegraph the likely result. Jeans and trainers is an unlikely look for a party leader with any expectation of triumphing over the First Minister in the seat she has held since it was created in 2011, far less removing her from Bute House.
‘Are you feeling confident?’ I asked him.
‘Yes, I think it’s safe to say we’ve shown the most energy in the campaign. I think it’s safe to say we’ve shown the most positivity in the campaign, we’ve had the big ideas...’ It sounded like a no.
Over in Govanhill’s square mile of urban decay, Miss Sturgeon found a rare positive on which to major.
‘Great we’ve got everybody who lives here able to vote,’ she said, cheerily – a reference to the fact that this is the first election to let people with refugee status do so.
Beside her stood Roza Salih, the lead SNP candidate on the Glasgow regional list, who will be the first former refugee to be elected to parliament if she wins a seat.
Naturally, there were selfies, too, though none of the variety mischievously mocked up on community social media pages where Miss Sturgeon is seen beaming into her phone while posing next to piles of Govanhill’s discarded rubbish.
There was a touching request for a video message, too. Would the First Minister mind recording a few words for the mother of a Syrian Scot who was ill with Covid-19?
WOULD she mind? This was public appearance gold dust. ‘It’s Nicola Sturgeon here, First Minister of Scotland, with your son in Glasgow. I understand you’re not well with Covid so I wanted to send you my best wishes for a speedy recovery. Get well soon.’
A man with an SNP rosette piped up to assure the FM he would be spending the day ‘campaigning for Auntie Nicola’. Time will tell whether his sentiments are representative of the wider community where, in recent years, one of the polling stations, St Bride’s Primary, has had to install washing machines to rid pupils’ clothes of bedbugs.
Frances Stojilkovic, who grew up in the area and campaigns for improvements to it, is certainly not a believer. She said: ‘We’ve met with her many times, taken marches to her office to have the place cleaned up but nothing has changed.
‘I think she should get her own constituency sorted first before anything else like independence. That should be a priority – there’s people living in poverty.’
Miss Sturgeon was later involved in an ugly confrontation with independent candidate and former Britain First deputy leader Jayda Fransen, who was previously jailed after being convicted of racially aggravated harassment.
In footage posted on the British Freedom Party’s Twitter feed, the First Minister is approached by Fransen, who asks her about ‘mass immigration’ and ‘Marxism’.
After an exchange, Miss Sturgeon brands Fransen ‘a fascist’ and ‘a racist’ before walking away.
One of the ironies of the face-off between the SNP and Labour leaders in Glasgow Southside is that it is the one who emerged from the huge sandstone home in Pollokshields – not the one who rocked up at the epicentre of her constituency’s deprivation – who has sounded more convincing on poverty.
The greater irony, of course, is that will likely not matter.
Here, like everywhere else in the land, the promise of independence, not the promise of fixing broken communities, is the trump card that gets the SNP over the line.