The Commonwealth Games are the last thing Glasgow needs – here's why

Since Glasgow last played host to this imperial hangover, the former second city of the empire has carved out its place in the global “events economy”. As presidents and princes descended on Glasgow for COP26, its refuse workers, among the lowest paid in Scotland, had no choice but to strike for fair pay.

Shielded from the city by the steel wall which surrounded the SECC, those decision-makers who did not travel by limousine were granted free public transport and a special integrated ticket – a feat Glasgow’s public transport campaigners had long been told was impossible.

Two years later, the inaugural UCI World Cycling Championships came to town. Promising athletes and visitors the “warmest of welcomes”, Glasgow City Council once again cold-shouldered the city’s employees.

Workers were offered derisory pay offers as the cost of living crisis reached its peak and corporate profits ballooned. Staff at the Emirates Arena walked out on strike for 48 hours as track cycling began at the Sir Chris Hoy Velodrome.

(Image: Mark Runnacles/Getty) For the chief executive of Glasgow Life, Susan Deighan, the city is now “a world-leading festival and events destination”. Such status apparently affords Glasgow “global exposure, developing, and promoting the city’s enviable international brand, People Make Glasgow”. The problem, of course, is that in this equation people do not make Glasgow, an over-reliance on inward investment does.

Faced with more than £7.1 million worth of cuts, Glasgow Life’s own employees were among those to withdraw their labour as the cycling championships got under way.

As GMB trade union shop steward Sean O’Neill wrote last year: “Glasgow cannot claim to be a world-class city for international events when the workforce this reputation depends upon are treated like second-class citizens.”

Where once heavy industry dominated Glasgow, 40 years of aggressive neoliberalism, coupled with years of disinvestment, has ensured the ascendance of the service-based economy. Glasgow’s political class seized upon this transformation. Luring mobile capital quickly became central to the city’s post-industrial economy as Glasgow became an entrepreneurial city and morphed to accommodate the needs of multi-national investors.

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Where industrial employment disappeared, the gig economy took root and now provides the perfect array of options for the weekend visitor. Glasgow offers lively nightlife with a proliferation of bars and restaurants to tourists – but a lot of precarious, low-wage employment to its young people. Without a strategy to develop productive industry, pursuing the circus of international events has become the organising principle of economic development in the city.

Glasgow now seems to lurch from one mediocre junket to another, offering business an opportunity to flaunt the city’s reputation, but driving up costs and rents for residents.

This is why, when nowhere else had pockets deep enough to host the Commonwealth Games, supposedly cash-strapped Glasgow relished the opportunity. It is literally built for it, just as it was built to be home to endless blocks of student accommodation and the European headquarters of Barclays Bank at Buchanan Wharf.

As the website Glasgow Games Monitor 2014 noted a decade ago, “large-scale ‘mega-events’ and ‘regeneration’ are now routinely used for aggressive property development and gentrification, increasing property and tax bases, and inevitably forcing less well-off people out of ‘regenerated areas’ through land speculation, rent increases and the cost of living. All this, of course, is justified with bullshit about the ‘common good’.”

This economic model sits comfortably with Scottish nationalism’s dominant currents. The SNP responded to the defeat of the Yes campaign in 2014 by courting global celebrity. Scotland, so the argument went, was a “state-in-waiting” and should behave like one by staking out her place in the global order. Scottish “hubs” opened in Brussels, Berlin and Washington. Nicola Sturgeon broke America with appearances on The Daily Show, press conferences with Nancy Pelosi and selfies with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

The domestic front of this mission focused on attracting multi-national capital and Glasgow was ready to play its part, searching for its place among the metropolitan cities of the European continent. Our city, argue those heralding last week’s news, has a lot to offer the world. All too often, however, this festival atmosphere is a luxury not afforded to local people.

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Over the last 10 years, the number of public leisure facilities has dwindled as austerity has worn through Scotland’s social fabric.

At least 83 public libraries have closed since 2010. In the five years to 2022, the staffing of Scotland’s leisure services was reduced by 20%. Glasgow alone cut almost 100 leisure staff during that period. Indeed, having closed 101 venues during the pandemic, Glasgow Life kept 62 closed for the year after lockdown was lifted.

During the build-up to the 2014 Commonwealth Games, council leader Gordon Matheson suggested that Glasgow’s Red Road Flats should be demolished as part of the opening ceremony, showcasing the city’s regeneration to the world.

The plans to bring the high-rise blocks down followed the privatisation of Glasgow’s housing stock a decade earlier – the largest transfer of public-sector housing stock that had ever taken place in Western Europe. The Red Road’s (below) new landlords, Glasgow Housing Association (GHA), soon decided that the cost of maintaining the flats outweighed rent receipts and reached for the wrecking ball.

Ultimately, the plan to include the demolition in the Games’s opening was dropped. The notion, however, that the built environment of Glasgow’s working class could be destroyed as the curtain-raiser to a global spectacle lingers in the city’s contemporary political economy. Later this year, GHA’s successor Wheatley Homes plans to demolish four more tower blocks. Despite residents’ determined efforts, if Wheatley gets its way, the Wyndford flats in Maryhill will be rubble by the time of the 2026 Games.

You can be sure, however, that Sauchiehall Street will be transformed from its present state of disrepair just in time for the opening ceremony.

This is the key contradiction: Glasgow operates on a timetable set not by its citizens, but the bidding war for global events. The city’s quest to attain the 2026 Games only confirms the concerns that those who live here play permanent second fiddle to profit. That’s simply not sustainable. The Commonwealth Games is the last thing Glasgow needs.