Scotland’s in a mess and the stink leads all the way back to Bute House

WALKING through Glasgow city centre on Saturday, for the first time in months, I was struck almost immediately by the mess. every hundred paces or so along Buchanan Street and Argyle Street, where public bins usually stood, there were towering volcanoes of garbage erupting their trash all over the pavement.

It was late morning and the town was busy, so shoppers and tourists and leafleters for every god and every cause had to navigate swirling burger wrappers and tumbling coffee cups.

I saw one business owner taping up the bin outside her premises with bin liners. Whether this was to keep the refuse in or the wasps out, I couldn’t tell.

I passed by a restaurant where a luckless young staff member was trying to cram just one more rubbish bag into a cavernous blue wheelie bin that resembled an industrial-sized Hungry Hungry Hippo.

An apparent victory was short-lived when, no sooner had he returned inside, the mighty beast belched the bag onto the pavement, its appetite finally sated.

Rotting

the distended bins weren’t the worst of it. that honour would have to go to the stench. the air was thick with the rancidsweet odour of rotting fast food and heaven knows what else.

Dear Green Place, one of the handsomest cities in the country, looked and smelled like a midden.

this was the state of Scotland’s largest city after just a couple of days of industrial action. What will it look like by thursday, when the first phase of the bin men’s strike concludes?

that’s not the end of it, though. Phase two kicks in next tuesday. refuse workers will have five days to clear the backlog before the rubbish is left to pile up for another week. Glasgow’s residents and retailers have more misery ahead.

In that, they will be joined by residents and retailers across the country as more refuse workers walk out over pay.

We have seen in recent days the toll similar strike action has taken on edinburgh, with the city’s streets pocked by one overflowing bin after another, a dismal sight at any time but especially grim during the festival.

A lot of lasting bad impressions will have been made on people who bring money into edinburgh’s economy every year.

I can’t find it in me to blame the bin men. they do a job many would consider unpleasant but one that is essential. the collecting and processing of household and commercial waste is a public good and yet those who step up to do it are not valued properly.

earlier this year, a bin man told a local paper in Glasgow that, after tax and household bills, he was left with just £300 a month to feed his family and meet other day-to-day costs. Some of his colleagues were so poorly paid, he said, that they would be better off on Universal Credit.

With the cost of heating a home, feeding a family and running a car all surging at once, low-paid workers who were already struggling are fighting for every extra penny they can get. Who wouldn’t do the same in their situation?

So, if the bin men aren’t to blame, who is? Cosla, the local authority umbrella body that negotiates pay for its member councils? Well, it has hardly covered itself in glory. Not only are refuse workers on strike, but school staff are about to be too.

for three days next month, all councilrun nurseries and primary schools in Glasgow will be shuttered as cleaners, janitors, dinner ladies and early years staff take industrial action. What’s more, the eIS is holding a consultative ballot among teachers and recommending they reject a 5 per cent pay bump.

On thursday, StV’s political editor Colin Mackay doorstepped Cosla president Shona Morrison ahead of talks with representatives of ministers and trade union leaders. When Mackay asked why it had taken so long to get everyone around the negotiating table, Morrison said: ‘We’re really happy to be sitting and having the opportunity, with the Scottish Government, with our trade unions, to open discussions.’

Fealty

Open discussions. One week into edinburgh’s bin strike and discussions were only just opening. When Morrison took over the presidency of Cosla two months ago, becoming the first ever Nationalist councillor to do so, there were fears over whether she would be able to set aside partisan politics and put the interests of local government ahead of her fealty to the SNP. On the strength of what we’ve seen so far, the real concern is not her politics but her effectiveness.

But even Cosla can only do so much. the buck stops, in the end, with the Scottish Government.

It had tried to ignore the buck, then, as edinburgh’s waste crisis worsened, leapt into action and proposed the buck be passed around some more in a negotiating room. John Swinney was sent out to make it look like St Andrew’s House was a-buzz with activity, straining every sinew to support a solution to the pay dispute.

the Deputy first Minister isn’t a dynamic figure at the best of times but someone in the press office thought it a good idea to have him address the issue during a visit to the edinburgh Centre for robotics. there was Swinney, flanked by two automatons, droning out his linesto-take and somehow sounding more pre-programmed than the androids.

Swinney was the one putting a brave, if inscrutably passive, face on these matters because celebrity first Minister Nicola Sturgeon was in Copenhagen having what we can only assume was a very awkward meeting with the Danish foreign minister. there’s nothing rotten in the state of Denmark – that’s edinburgh you’re thinking of – but Sturgeon had reportedly requested face-time with the country’s leader Mette frederiksen, only to be given Jeppe Kofod instead.

Sturgeon was visiting Denmark to open yet another of her quasi-embassies but it is unlikely she would have hung around and tried to help resolve the bin strike anyway.

the first Minister wants to avoid it for the same reason Swinney and every other SNP minister does: it is their government that is ultimately to blame. Despite their efforts to shift responsibility onto Westminster, it is this Scottish Government that has spent 15 years in power gutting local government of resources.

Reduced

In the past decade, central government has cut roughly £1billion from council budgets, though Scottish Labour has suggested the real figure could be as high as £6billion. It has done so as part of a general trend of centralisation but also because council cuts are the easiest to get away with: people don’t miss local services until they’re gone, or have been severely reduced.

Yes, Scottish ministers have had Westminster austerity to contend with, but that’s what government is about: making choices. the SNP doesn’t like making choices because choices betray priorities and priorities are anathema to a populist party. the Nationalists must be all things to all people to keep together their coalition for independence. Instead of priorities, they went for headlines and now, years down the line, we are finally seeing the corrections and clarifications.

Nothing terrifies a populist like unpopularity. But when avoiding unpopularity is a government’s primary objective, when it cares less about running the state it has and more about pretending there will be no such problems in the state it wants, these are the sort of outcomes that follow.

Scotland’s streets are a mess because its local government finances are a mess and the stink leads all the way back to Bute House.