It’s been quite a week in Glasgow, from City Chambers drama to alleged bombs in Amarone. No doubt all the detail about the restaurant standoff will emerge in the next few days: but what actually happened at the Council?
I don’t mean the arguments, resignations and ill councillors being taxied in to vote. I mean the detail. I live in Glasgow, I pay council tax here, I would really like to know what differences I will notice as a result of Labour’s budget. I bought the Herald on Friday expecting to find a detailed breakdown of not only Glasgow but all of the other council’s budget decisions, setting out what’s being cut and which, if any, areas are receiving investment.
Oddly, I didn’t find that. I found pages of prose about the fallings out and the bullying allegations, but very little on where my money is to be spent. So I turned to the BBC, STV, the Glaswegian and the Scotsman: surely one of them would have written an in-depth analysis of the budget?
Not really. Here is the sum total of what I found out from these combined news sources. Margaret Curran MP says that the Opposition’s budget would have increased parking charges and cut funding to carers and schools. The Council leader Gordon Matheson says that the budget includes £2m to tackle youth unemployment, £12m for road repairs and £200,000 for new youth enterprise zones. Gordon Matheson also says there is something called the Glasgow Guarantee (not explained) and that there will be a 50% subsidy to employers (for what and to which kind of employer is not clear).
There doesn’t make any sense. People have resigned over this budget. It almost brought down the entire council. Surely, there must be some basic philosophical difference between the Labour party’s budget and the Opposition one? They must have taken fundamentally divergent approaches, prioritising and strategically directing funding in sharply contrasting ways, and there must now be consequences for particular areas of Glasgow life that political journalists could identify and discuss.
That must be the case. Otherwise, I’d have to conclude that the councillors were just fighting about who gets to sit in the big chair and wear the fancy chain, and that none of the journalists had actually read the budget. And that can’t be true, can it?