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11 July 2013updated 26 Sep 2015 12:46pm

In memory: Kirsty Milne

Former NS staffer Dr Kirsty Milne has died.

By New Statesman

We are sad to report the loss of a former New Statesman editor, Dr Kirsty Milne.

After joining the New Statesman staff in 1993 following its merger with her former paper New Society, Kirsty wrote reviews and features for the NS and other publications, including the Times, Telegraph and a politics column for the Scotsman. She later became a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and a Research Fellow specialising in early modern English and the classics at Wolfson College, Oxford.

She died this week and will be much missed. Sarah Baxter, a colleague at the magazine in the early 90s and now Deputy Editor at the Sunday Times, said: “Kirsty was a wonderful colleague, full of energy, mischief and fun. She loved political ideas and political intrigue, and wrote about them brilliantly. She was always insistent that her name was pronounced Keersty, not Kursty … After being told off a few times, I’ve never been able to pronounce Kirsty any other way. She was my great friend and confidante at the Statesman, and I’ll miss her dearly.”

Below is a reprint of the first article she wrote for the NS entitled, “Inside the Glasgow glass envelope”, and dated 21 November 1986.

Inside the Glasgow glass envelope

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What can you do for a city undergoing an economic identity crisis? With dying industrial heartlands, unemployment running above 20 per cent and a reputation for social deprivation which continues to stick? ‘Adapt or die’ is the response most commonly to be heard in Glasgow, and the result is a remarkable phenomenon — a city in search of a future.

There’s no question that Glasgow is in danger of being left behind, a casualty city which just happened to be, in the words of one council official, ‘in the wrong place, facing the wrong way, and making the wrong things’. Like the rest of Britain, Glasgow has had to watch the slow decline of its traditional manufacturing base — in shipbuilding, steel and engineering. There are only two shipyards left; the Clyde used to be crucial to Glasgow and now people are saying bitterly that you can fish in it. Manufacturing in Glasgow contracted by 30 per cent between 1978 and 1983, and plants which were once familiar features of the city continue to close.

The rate of redundancies, which peaked in 1980, is slowing down, but the cumulative result is a bad case of long-term unemployment: latest figures show that of the 77,204 jobless in Glasgow, 9,280 have been out of work for more than six years. Where are the new jobs to come from? The electronics industry clearly isn’t the knight on the high-tech charger that’s required; it only provides 42,000 jobs in the whole of Scotland, and besides, computer companies have tended to locate in other parts of ‘Silicon Glen’, especially New Towns.

To the rescue come Glasgow City Council and the Scottish Development Agency (SDA), both of which have put their faith in the service sector as the only realistic area for growth in employment. To this end there’s been a lot of emphasis on improving the quality of the city centre, which is visibly in the process of turning itself inside out. The whole area known as Merchant City, with its extravagant Victorian facades, is being redeveloped to provide shops, offices and up to 2,000 homes as bait for Glasgow yuppies. South of Argyle St a huge site awaits a glass envelope which will protect a shopping centre, an ice rink and a multi-storey car park from the incessant Scottish rain in the £62m St Enoch’s development. Even the old fish market, the Briggait, has been turned into glossy umbrella forstalls and specialist shops, though with a view across the Clyde to the Gorbals it looks as much like Covent Garden as a fish out of water.

Nevertheless, Donald Dewar, Shadow Scottish Secretary and MP for Glasgow Garscadden, describes the general atmosphere with the greater precision: ‘the place is hopping’. And much of the hopping takes place under the careful eyes of the council and the SDA, working to combine public spending with private investment in as many projects as possible. The SDA is a unique phenomenon (and the Treasury would like it to stay that way): a semi-independent, government- funded organisation set up by Harold Wilson in 1975 to do something about the Scottish economy. As a leading industrial landlord with a gross annual budget of more than £130m, the SDA is much respected by the 200 or so people who make up the Scottish establishment for being hard­headed and commercially-minded. Not surprising, then, that a Treasury review last month criticised the SDA for being too interventionist. Certainly it has a finger in innumerable pies — in Glasgow alone it put money into the Scottish Conference and Exhibition Centre, initiated the GEAR project to put money into the East End of Glasgow, and is managing the 1988 Glasgow Garden Festival through a wholly-owned subsidiary.

Last year it set up a new group, Glasgow Action, to promote the city as a business location and the dynamic young director, David Macdonald, is as much interested in the music business as in merchant banks (Glasgow, remember, produced not only Ultravox and Simple Minds but the Associates and Strawberry Switchblade as well). His organisation has specific targets: relieving Glasgow of its status as a ‘branch economy’ (i.e. attracting more company HQs to Glasgow — Britoil was a recent success); improving air links with Europe and the USA; developing Glasgow’s tourist industry (the Burrell Collection, opened in 1983, has now overtaken Edinburgh castle as Scotland’s top tourist attraction).

However, there’s nothing he can teach Glasgow City Council about selling the city; after all, for three years now Mr Happy has been seen on London buses proclaiming ‘Glasgow’s Miles Better’ and the campaign has been given a boost since Glasgow won the British nomination for European City of Culture in 1990. Macdonald describes the council as ‘solidly socialist and very pragmatic with it . . . the city’s interests always come first’. Perhaps it’s the pragmatism born of numerical supremacy (the Labour group has 50 councillors to the Conservatives’ 5, and a visiting Hackney councillor was reputedly shocked when she saw how cosily collusive they all were).

The council needs its pragmatism when it comes to housing; as the biggest landlord in Europe it has the dubious distinction of presiding over some of the worst council housing in Britain: an estimate 10,000 homes in Glasgow don’t have a bath. Government spending restrictions have limited the council’s capital spending to modernisation and planned repairs, so it’s small wonder that they should be encouraging private developers and housing associations to build and convert more homes — even selling council houses to tenants the deprived suburb of Easterhouse. But the core of the housing problem remains the post-war estates built on the periphery of the city: Pollok, Castlemilk, Easterhouse and Drumchapel. Almost one in four of the unemployed in Glasgow lives there.

What will the expansion of the service sector do for those one in four? Will it pick up the long-term unemployed? Retailing and office work may be subject to mechanisation and contraction of numbers in the future as manufacturing has been in the past. There are some economists that would argue that, anyway, the growth of the service sector goes hand in hand with the growth of the manufacturing industry. In Glasgow, Donald Dewar speaks of the need for a ‘balanced economy’ with ‘a core of manufacturing which is competitive’. Campbell Christie, General Secretary of the STUC is also unhappy about the over-reliance on the service sector. He would like to see Glasgow’s traditional areas of manufacturing, including the shipyards, sustained; new industries developed; and a major programme of expenditure on housing and construction projects to provide jobs and tackle Glasgow’s decaying infrastructure.

Earlier this month, the Invisible Export Council confirmed that employment in the UK service sector isn’t likely to increase substantially and won’t compensate for the jobs lost in manufacturing industry. But even if the service sector does represent the only real possibility for growth in Glasgow (and it’s worth pointing out that it’s remained more or less static since 1971), a depressing scenario suggests itself – that of a pepped-up city centre, a flourishing service sector, and, on the periphery, the long-term marginalised unemployed. In microcosm, it could be what’s in store for the British economy as a whole: 87 per cent of us in work and getting richer – and the rest out in the cold.

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