| There were emotional scenes this
week as council officials began relocating asylum seekers from Sighthill to other areas.
Police were called when the driver of one bus discovered a group of Sighthill residents
clinging to the vehicle's transmission tunnel. The shaken driver told the JT: "It was
terrible, shocking really. They begged to go with the refugees rather than continue living
in Sighthill." Glasgow council officials
admitted last night that the whole refugee affair could have been better handled.
"We're sorry that the outbreaks of racist violence have brought Sighthill into the
public eye. Hopefully after we get the refugees out the situation will calm down and we
can get back to normal - pretending that places like Sighthill don't exist."
Sighthill had been built as part of the great postwar
housing boom, as Architectural Historian Professor Simon Schematics told the JT,
"These estates were designed as filing cabinets with windows - somewhere to hold the
workless. Unfortunately there was a design flaw in the structures - doors. Which meant
that the residents could get out and give the rest of us a red neck by reminding the world
that there's nothing nice about poverty .The next generation of long term residential
transit camps will be consequently built in even more peripheral areas. There are a few
brown field sites on Saturn that look promising."
The Daily Record came in for criticism after implying that
the Kurdish refugee murdered in the city might have been an economic migrant rather than
an asylum seeker. |
The paper's editor told the JT:
"Here's a man who possibly came here to start a business, look after himself and send
money back to his family. Is that the kind of example we want to set for our local
youth?" The paper's editor would have had more
to say on the subject but he had to take a call from his son, "out in Australia,
doing very well for himself."
Elsewhere, the "it was better in the old days"
sepia-tinged nostalgia industry contrasted today's violent neds with yesteryore's loveable
street urchins. Eighty-something Hughie from the Gorbals remembers the old days in the
1930s slum streets of Glasgow: "Aye we were poor, but there was a sense of community
then. If anybody needed a lend of a razor to open up a polisman you only had to
ask…"
Despite the area's reputation, it was clear this week that
some professionals were not giving up on Sighthill. Glasgow Council's head of community
development, speaking from the estate's there-used-to-be-shops-here-centre told the JT:
"We're committed to dealing positively with the image problems the area has and to
that end we've spent £100K on a new marketing slogan for the area." The council head
showed the JT the new slogan "Sighthill's Smashing" emblazoned on the back of
his nice new Volvo.
"I'd love to chat longer" he told the
JT,"But I want to get out of here and back home to Knightswood before it gets
dark." |
