Glasgow City Council's War on Democracy

It’s less than a year since Glasgow City Council announced measures to drastically curtail the number of marches and parades in the city centre – reportedly by up to ‘ninety percent’. This policy was brought in ostensibly to cut back on the estimated 250 Orange Order parades through the city each year, and to allow the typically 10,000 strong king-billy-won-a-battle-three-hunner-years-ago-fuck-the-cafflics parade in early July to be rerouted out of the city centre.
Now Leftfield can reveal that this same policy is being used as a pretext to disallow, reroute and denigrate marches held by groups as diverse as the trade union and environmental movements.

Controversy over the new parades policy came to the fore last December, when The Wave demonstration, demanding urgent action over climate change, wasforced out of its city centre route, which it had taken the two years previously, and made to march between parks in outlying regions of the city. The police and the council parades committee claimed a city centre route would bring disruption to Christmas shopping. In London, on the other hand, the 50,000 strong march was allowed to march through Westminster, the heart of government.

And now, in perhaps their most audacious curtailment of the right to protest yet, the council have not only denied the trade union Unison the right to hold their demonstration against public service cuts in the city centre, but forced it back to 9.30am in the morning. The march will assemble on University Avenue – on the Glasgow University campus, and typically dead at this time on a Saturday – and be entirely confined to the west end, ending at a rally inside Kelvingrove Park.

Sources at Unison Scotland have told Leftfield that this was the best arrangement on offer from the council , and that attempts were made to push for the demo to be held later on in the day – particularly given that it is a national mobilisation, with coaches coming from union branches across Scotland – and for a more central assembly point. It is understood the council are insisting that this has to be the case to justify their restrictions on Orange walks and Irish Republican parades, and to prove that they are not discriminating on any one particular group.

The precedent for the decision on the upcoming Unison march was set by the rerouteing of the 10,000-strong demo against education cuts organised by the teacher’s union, the EIS, last month. Blytheswood Square has traditionally been a meeting point for marches held by the trade unions, the anti-war movement and so on. Now, however, it houses a five star hotel – and the EIS application to meet there was rejected on these grounds, forcing a relocation to the west end. Says Jim Coleman, now leader of GCC: “Gathering there will no longer be acceptable. There will be businesses in the city centre wanting us to come up with a new policy on parades. We need to look at new methods of parading around the city centre, not through it.”

the cooncil got very up set when the marchers wouldn't relocate to kelvingrove

The council have clearly laid out where their priorities lie – not in Glasgow’s proud working class tradition of trade unionism and industrial militancy, but in further gentrification and commercialisation of our city’s streets. This attack on the basic right of the labour movement to march in central Glasgow is particularly ironic given the grip that the Labour Party possess over the City Chambers, and further points to the insanity of the trade unions continuing to fund a political party that blatantly does not represent their interests.
Glasgow clearly has its own unique set of issues when it comes to marches – Glasgow allegedly has more Orange marches than Derry and Belfast combined, and is surely one of the only cities in the world where the Irish community can’t hold a St Patrick’s Day parade without being attacked by racist thugs. Yet this is now being used as an excuse by GCC to come down hard on demonstrations by everyone – when they evidently possess their own agenda: that the city centre is for commercial use and profit-making, not for cultural or political use, no matter how ‘respectable’ or ‘official’ the cause. For further evidence on this, only a few weeks ago a group of SSY members were doing a stall outside the now empty Borders store on Buchanan Street – we’d barely even set up when a besuited man from Land and Environmental Services strode up and informed us that they needed permission to do a stall. This was news to a group of comrades who’d been doing stalls at the same location for years, and right enough, we ignored him and continued on for the next hour and a half.

We need to reclaim the streets – last November when we took to them in our hundreds to oppose the Scottish Defence League, the police were powerless to stop us, even though the march was in effect illegal. Meanwhile, the establishment-backed Scotland United group had had to jump through hoops to get a route approved through the city centre.
SSY usually holds a Legalise Cannabis march each summer – I wouldn’t hold your breath on us getting one with council backing this year. Not unless it’s held in the middle of a fucking roundabout in the middle of a fucking industrial estate at half seven in the morning.