The weekend of Storm Arwen, I flew from Stornoway to Edinburgh to meet a friend. Despite doom-laden travel warnings in the preceding week, the fight was not cancelled and left bang on time. If you want to learn to appreciate Scotland, there is no better way than to take this flight on a clear, sunny day. Snow-capped mountains interspersed with blue lochs sparkled beneath us as we flew south before the plane banked over the majestic expanse of the Firth of Forth and landed at Ingliston.
At Edinburgh airport, there was something else to appreciate too: infrastructure. On the Edinburgh tram, which goes every seven minutes, I was whisked to the centre of town in what felt like mere moments. This contrasts sharply with Glasgow. There is now at least an efficient bus link from Glasgow airport to the city centre, but the city is still waiting for a rail link.
I’ve lost count of the number of times a link has been proposed and scrapped, but I do remember when the useful car park inside Glasgow Central station was shut to make room for this chimera. The link never materialised, and the car park never reopened, meaning a small net infrastructure loss replaced a potentially huge net infrastructure gain.
These failures matter. They are a way of deprioritising Scotland’s largest city. Connectivity is always a marker of economic importance, and there is no surer way of sucking the lifeblood out of a locality than to fail to provide adequate transport links — or, nowadays, digital connectivity. As the Scottish Association for Public Transport points out: “It is the norm at major airports in Europe (and England) to be able to transfer from the airport terminal to the domestic rail network for onward travel to anywhere in the country.”
In some ways, all else flows from this. We may all be flying less in future, but Gordon Dewar, chief executive of Edinburgh airport, is right when he says that “the ability to connect globally is important for a small country on the tip of an island on the northern cost of Europe”. It’s good, then, that an airport link for Glasgow is back on the agenda.
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Funding for a rail or tram link was included in the Glasgow city deal, and the economic strategy plan for Glasgow city region, which was released this week, underlines that commitment. The 12-point plan, which has the ambitious goal of ensuring Glasgow city region will have “the most innovative, inclusive and resilient economy in the UK” by 2030, includes provisions for a Glasgow city region metro that will link major transport hubs, including the airport, as well as connecting “unserved and underserved areas” — an equally important goal.
There are also plans to reinvent the River Clyde, which the economic strategy document describes as “the greatest untapped development opportunity in western Europe”. That sounds about right. There has of course been successful development along the Clyde, but it is still hard to imagine anywhere else in western Europe where the river front as a unit has been as neglected as in Glasgow and Inverclyde.
Again, consciously or unconsciously, this is about deprioritising Scotland’s largest city, and we may reasonably ask why that is. Because it is post-industrial? Because it has many deprived areas? Because it is a radical, Jimmy Reid-spawning, yes-voting kind of a place?
Whatever the reason, Glasgow is certainly emasculated by not having a single metropolitan authority, as Edinburgh does. The Glasgow city region economic strategy plan is the work of a “cabinet” of eight council leaders from the “partner” authorities that comprise the region. But It’s hard not to feel that the plan could better be implemented by a single authority with deeper pockets, and that if it fails to deliver the committee structure could be a reason.
This problem does not just afflict Glasgow. In Dundee — perhaps the most radical of all Scotland’s cities and one whose huge potential and strategic advantages have routinely been overlooked — there is a campaign to redraw city boundaries. Dundee Civic Trust is advocating an extension to the north, west and east “not for the aggrandisement of our city fathers and officials”, as the chairman, Donald Gordon, recently wrote in the trust’s journal, “but to ensure joined-up thinking between neighbouring streets in ‘Greater Dundee’ which are in different council areas”.
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In a parallel with the different treatment meted out to Glasgow and Edinburgh, the City of Dundee was curtailed in 1996 when council boundaries in Scotland were redrawn, while Aberdeen was allowed to keep the generous boundary it had been accorded in the 1975 local government reforms. As a result, Dundee now has one of the densest urban populations in Scotland and many “Dundonians” living outwith what Dundee Civic Trust views as “the logical boundaries of the city”.
It is perhaps too much to suspect a conspiracy, but there can be little doubt that Scotland’s cities have not been treated equally. Perhaps this is what comes of living in a country that is not just absurdly centralised but centralised on a place beyond our own borders. Whatever the reason for declawing some Scottish cities and empowering others, it needs to stop. As Scotland moves forward into the next stage of its development, we need all our cities to be economically productive and to be great and inclusive places to live.
We could perhaps take a lesson from Germany, where no one city dominates but each has its own strengths. In the meantime, I look forward to the day when the journey from Glasgow airport to the city centre will be as seamless as the equivalent journey in Edinburgh. May it come soon.
