Bin strikes and protests risk humiliation for Glasgow on world stage
‘It’s going to be an absolute embarrassment when we will shortly have world leaders stepping over bin bags’
With more than 120 world leaders heading to Glasgow for the UN climate summit, it should have been a once-in-ageneration chance to show off the very best of Britain to the watching world.
Instead, Joe Biden, Emmanuel Macron and others will be greeted by rubbish-strewn streets, gridlocked roads, cancelled trains, glued-down protesters and a plague of rats after a city under SNP leadership has turned into a “midden”.
Refuse workers and train drivers have announced they will go on strike for a week of the 13-day conference, prompting warnings of “world leaders stepping over bin bags” and a “humiliation on the world stage”.
A chronic shortage of accommodation in Glasgow, which has led to a 3,000 per cent increase in the price of hotel rooms, has forced some delegations to make bookings 130 miles away, while two eastern European cruise liners have been brought to the Clyde as makeshift dormitories.
It has prompted anger from Westminster, which believes Nicola Sturgeon, the First Minister, and Glasgow’s Snp-run council have risked the event turning into a national embarrassment.
“It will be chaos if this continues,” said one senior UK government source.
When former energy minister Claire Perry, the then president of Cop26, announced two years ago that Glasgow would host the summit, she said it was the ideal venue because it is “one of the UK’S most sustainable cities with a great track record for hosting highprofile international events”.
That reputation is now in shreds. World leaders will be treated to the sight of rubbish-strewn streets, fly-tipped furniture and rats in the gutters thanks to the city council’s shake-up of refuse collections.
Earlier this year the council ditched fortnightly bin collections in favour of one every three weeks. At the same time it introduced a £35 charge for disposing of large items, leading to an inevitable increase in fly-tipping.
Thomas Kerr, the leader of the Conservative group on Glasgow council, said the city had become “the fly-tipping capital of Britain”. And critics were enraged when Susan Aitken, the council leader, brushed off the crisis by claiming the city merely needed a “spruce up”.
Glasgow’s rat population has thrived on the uncollected food waste to become the fourth-biggest in the country, and three refuse collectors have been injured by the rodents.
Last week refuse workers voted to go on strike during the conference unless they are paid more money. The irony of a summit to clean up the planet being held in a city that cannot clean up its own streets will not be lost on those attending.
Anas Sarwar, the Scottish Labour leader, said the SNP had ensured that “Scotland is set to be humiliated on the world stage”, while Paul Sweeney, the Labour MSP for Glasgow, said: “It’s going to be an absolute embarrassment when we will shortly have world leaders stepping over bin bags.”
Hours after the GMB announced strike action by refuse workers, the RMT union announced a walkout by Scotrail staff from Nov 1 to Nov 8, a significant portion of the conference.
MSP Graham Simpson, Scotland’s Conservative shadow transport minister, said the industrial action was “a major embarrassment for the SNP” and would mean world leaders and delegates arriving in a city where rail services will have “ground to a halt”.
The likes of President Biden, of course, are unlikely to hop on the train to get to Cop, but many of the 25,000 delegates would have done, and now they will be forced on to the roads to get from their hotels to the Scottish Event Campus (SEC).
Even before the rail strikes were announced, Glasgow council helpfully published a map of where to expect road congestion during the summit, which showed the entire city centre coloured in red.
A gridlocked motorway and road network will be like nectar to climate change protesters descending on the city from Extinction Rebellion, Insulate Britain and other groups.
They will relish the chance to bring VIP traffic to a complete standstill by glueing themselves to roads, especially after Assistant Chief Constable Bernie Higgins, Police Scotland’s gold commander for the event, said police on the ground “will facilitate unlawful protest, to a point” and would be “fair, friendly and accommodating”.
His comments have caused such alarm that Police Scotland was forced to call a press briefing on Thursday where they insisted activists will not be allowed to disrupt the conference and that “protest removal teams” stand ready to remove anyone who blocks roads.
If extremists needed any further encouragement, ministers in the Scottish Government have also issued an open invitation to them to disrupt the conference.
Patrick Harvie, co-leader of the Scottish Greens and an environment minister in Holyrood’s coalition government, has said he supports the use of direct action by climate change protesters and urged them to find “creative” ways to protest.
For the lucky few, conference events will be a short walk away from their hotels in the city, but others face long journeys.
One Whitehall source said: “Embassies and businesses have been getting in touch with the Government because they are unable to get hotel rooms. It’s a massive problem.
“Some of them have resorted to staying in England and commuting to Glasgow because there’s just nowhere to stay in Glasgow. We have heard of people deciding to stay as far away as Newcastle.”
There are still rooms available through Airbnb, but the so-called “Glasgow gold rush” has seen property owners asking mind-boggling sums. One apartment in the upmarket Kelvingrove area of the city has been advertised at £103,000 for 12 nights, while dozens of others are asking more than £20,000 for the duration of the conference.
A few hotel rooms remain available, but only to those prepared to pay 30 times the normal going rate. One room which normally costs £42 was being advertised for £1,400 per night during the summit, while other budget hotels are charging more than £1,000 per night.
The lack of beds has become so dire that two cruise ships are being berthed on the Clyde for people working at Cop26. The Latvian-flagged Romantika has already arrived in Renfrew, soon to be followed by the Silja Europa from Estonia in what the vessels’ owner Tallink described as a “last-minute agreement”.
In an act of desperation, the Scottish Government has now appealed to residents to open up their homes and allow conference-goers to sleep in their spare rooms.
They have suggested that the Cop26 Homestay scheme will enable delegates from poorer countries to “attend the summit and make their voices heard”, but local health chiefs are concerned it will simply turn Cop into a petri dish for Covid.
Jillian Evans, head of health intelligence at NHS Grampian, said: “People coming from different parts of the world, some where the vaccination programme is not the same as ours, there are risks associated with that.
“Then you put people in touch with one another, in folk’s homes, and that increases the risk even more.”
Downing Street fears that the multiple failings will not be enough to dampen Ms Sturgeon’s desire to hijack the event for her own means.
Leaked notes and Whatsapp messages have shown that Number 10 and the Cabinet Office are concerned she will use the event as a “soapbox for her independence obsession” and they want to make sure she does not share a platform with Boris Johnson at any point.