Glasgow Success Story

Here's an interesting article from The Herald which focuses on the regeneration of Easterhouse in Glasgow, once notorious for poverty and violent gangs, but now a thoroughly decent place for people to live and bring up their families.  

One person jumped out at me, a chap called Richard McShane, a straight-talker with lots of good ideas about how to get people off benefits and back to work.

“Look, the benefits systems does need to be changed, everybody knows that,” he says. “In deprived areas like this we’ve created a culture that means people are dependent on benefits – they think that’s all life has to offer. But this culture is destroying our youth. Young people look at their parents who are on benefits and often don't offer them any encouragement and presume that no-one cares. So why not just get all you can out of the welfare system?”

“These folk need a kick up the backside and that’s what we’ve been doing here at Phoenix. I don’t give them a shoulder to cry on, I give them that kick up the backside. I say, go and do that 12-hour a week job you’ve been offered. It will probably lead to something else, something better.”

McShane has worked extensively with young people in gangs, runs football teams and a number of other youth activities and notes that knife crime in the area is down.

“It can be scary for people who live on benefits to move away from the only thing they know,” he adds. “People are physically and mentally unfit. Poverty and boredom cause terrible problems. So many people are on medication for depression and feel utterly disengaged from their community.

“But I certainly agree with IDS on one thing – we’ll only get people out of poverty when we get them into work. Everyone has value. Here at Phoenix we try to give people purpose. But work gives people purpose too – and that’s what we need to prepare people for.”

Now if you ask me, that's the kind of attitude that's needed to reform the welfare system because getting people into work is the way out of poverty and the way to  achieve that is by ensuring that benefits are not allowed to become a way of life.


  
http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/14385404.Was_IDS__Easterhouse_epiphany_the_real_deal_/

Was IDS' Easterhouse epiphany the real deal?

Iain Duncan Smith visits Easterhouse in 2002. Photograph: Martin Shields

By Marianne Taylor - The Herald

IT'S not often you see a politician close to tears. It’s not often a Conservative party leader becomes closely associated with one of the most deprived places in western Europe. But no matter what happens to Iain Duncan Smith or Easterhouse in future, they will always be connected.

The then-Tory leader famously visited the sprawling estates in the east end of Glasgow in 2002 and posed for photographs outside dilapidated housing blocks, looking like he was about to cry. At the time he admitted his party had failed such places and their people in the past – but he committed both himself and the Tories to making amends. His would be the party of “compassionate Conservatism”, he said. The press framed the visit in strangely religious language; Duncan Smith, IDS as he is known, had undergone an “Easterhouse epiphany”, apparently.

There was much talk of Easterhouse and the aforementioned epiphany last weekend when IDS resigned as work and pensions secretary, a job he’d held for almost six years, citing cuts to benefits for the disabled and accusing Chancellor George Osborne of dividing society with his approach to welfare savings. It was strong, scathing, unexpected stuff. Politics is never straightforward, of course, and many believe the resignation was more about the forthcoming referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU than a principled stance on welfare cuts. IDS had, after all, signed off on many other cuts to his budget. But the move certainly shunted welfare reform to the top of the Westminster agenda, at least for a few days.