Demolition JobI have the mixed privilege of being born and raised in Scotland's largest city, Glasgow. Mixed, I say, because of its present as well as its past. Once a bustling centre of tobacco trade and ship building, it also exported human talent as its sons and daughters departed its urban throng for America and settled into fruitful and influential lifestyles that today leaves the USA with six towns bearing the same name. But the glory has also departed and Glasgow is now a city that bears the scars of an economic landscape under the 75-year cosh of socialist economic policy at all levels of government. And now it is no longer industry and commerce that leaps to mind when the word "Glasgow" is mentioned but more likely Rangers or Celtic. But the scales are beginning to fall from the eyes of the typical Glaswegian as they look at the prosperity of Britons around them and are now asking questions of their local leaders. To be more precise, they are providing the answers by way of votes as a referendum last week on whether to privatise Glasgow's socialist housing schemes was passed by a margin of 58.3 per cent to 41.7 per cent. "Ya beauty!" – as Glaswegian libertarians are wont to utter. To put it concisely, the public sector stock of 78,000 homes will now be put under the administration of its new private landlord, the Glasgow Housing Association (GHA). This is one of those PFI schemes (Private Finance Initiative) beloved of our not so leftist Labour Party which is part publicly invested in return for certain rents guarantees and targets. That I am not so keen on, but the long-term outcome is a private company running on private money. And what can be said of its former incompetent administrator, Glasgow City Council? The state of their management was akin to one of their dilapidated houses that blighted much of Glasgow's cityscape. I should know, for I spent my formative years amongst such properties. When the capacity for reason awoke in my infant mind, even that nascent libertarian realised the flat he was in courtesy of socialism was not up to the job. We lived in a typical Glasgow tenement house and we had a one bedroom flat for a five-person family. My brother and I slept in a bunk bed in the kitchen alcove and we were small enough to have our baths in the kitchen sink – which is just as well for there was no bathtub! Mind you, the provision of rats in the backyard was generous and thanks to free enterprise we had two grocery shops competing against each other across the road. As for ongoing government maintenance, I always recalled there being a large gouge in the wall beside our bed and it stayed there until we moved out. I must ask my mother if the council ever bothered to repair it. I think the tenements predated socialism, so they were generally of good structural integrity and durability. Unfortunately, ours was not and the council decided to condemn it to the iron ball and we were moved out to the suburbs and the latest thing in local government design – semi detached houses. In true Stalinist style, having plucked the chicken, they now fed it. Three bedrooms, a private garden and a bath to boot! Was this the socialist utopia promised by the prophet Marx? Yes, it was, for the Great Groucho did once observe that he also had worked himself up from a state of nothing to extreme poverty. In the providence of God, I think we were just plain lucky. But, then again, with hindsight I now know the architecture was just as ugly and unimaginative as the rest of the centrally planned efforts across the city and beyond. Like running sores across an otherwise acceptable panorama, socialism erected tower after tower of high-rise flats reaching up to thirty floors or more. These were no penthouse or skyscraper affairs. They were dingy, grey, ugly and guaranteed to complete the destruction of the soul of those already trapped in the vicious circle of state welfare dependency. I observe that people tend not to destroy things of beauty if they can help it. These monoliths were not things of beauty, therefore their tenants set about the vandalisation of these monuments to a likewise crumbling ideology. In due time, the powers that be got the message and the towers began to be pulled down as more humane forms of housing such as our own came into vogue. Pity they wasted the money in building them in the first place. Nothing like the housing free market to determine what the customer really wants. For outside Glasgow, in the socially-engineered "new towns" such as Cumbernauld which were meant to solve Glaswegian housing congestion, the government carefully and ostentatiously built row upon row of grey box-houses and thoughtfully provided a fully functional shopping centre with somehow won an award winning architectural design. Like Bruce Lee, Enter the Free Market. The shopping centres elsewhere that free market innovation produced were much nicer. Thanks to the increasing private ownership of cars, Cumbernauldians abandoned the Statist shopping centres and drove out of town. Not surprisingly, our government-approved shopping centre is now in a rather awful, unkempt state. She who once spake like a dragon is now silent they say. Not so, for in this housing privatisation the voice of Margaret Thatcher rings loud and clear from the vaults of political history. Whilst Glasgow City Council were racking up eventual debts of £900 million in their mishandling of that closed housing market, Mrs. Thatcher cut the Gordian Knot of tax and spend despair by giving public sector tenants the right to buy their houses off their local government. The effect was electric as the housing consumer was freed from their chains and allowed to express themselves. Today, in my childhood street, practically all the houses are now owned privately. Socialism indeed proposes, but Capitalism disposes. And predictably so, for our central planners did not reckon on the revolution in home ownership which gave everyone a chance to own their own house not only as a dwelling place but as a tangible asset bought with fixed term mortgage payments rather than interminable lifetime rent payments. These socialist bourgeoisies probably knew it was far more efficient for their tenants to buy off their houses but when power-driven ideology demands you keep your voting tenants under your thumb, reasoned compassion takes a hike. Oh, for an egalitarian socialist state where everyone is equally poor and they cannot look across the road at their neighbours' privately owned houses going up in value by a third in ten years! The doom of Socialism is always writ when it is forced to cohabit with Capitalism in a mixed economy. Mind you, it cannot even survive on its own. And so we come to the end of an era, or rather an error. Scotland still professes Socialism but another of its features was chipped from the edifice this week. Socialism is dying everywhere, gorged on coerced tax payments for decades, it is stumbling and awaiting the next blow from Free Market Capitalism that will stagger its gait that little bit more. Groaning under patients who are living longer to enjoy more diseases, the nationalised health service is next. Soon to stagger under the weight of a higher proportion of pensioners to workers, the welfare sector is next. Free Market Capitalism is also struggling under the Socialist tonnage thrown on its broad shoulders. That burden is diminishing and I envy my future grandchildren for when I am gone they will have to ask my aged offspring what this socialism thing was they keep on reading about in Grandpa's old Lew Rockwell articles. I
wonder if my kids will be able to answer! April 8 , 2002 Roland Watson [send him mail] writes from Edinburgh, Scotland. © 2002 LewRockwell.com |