Po-Faced Brigade

The announcement that the Commonwealth Games will open with the spectacular demolition of Glasgow's infamous Red Road flats brought out Scotland's po-faced brigade who say that that this spectacle will be unseemly in some way.

Now I can't see that I have to say and if these flats were going to come down this year anyway, then why not bring the buildings down at at time when Glasgow is on the world stage at the start of the Commonwealth Games.

Construction of the Red Road flats started in 1964 and at that time I was growing up in another Glasgow housing scheme (Arden) which had zero facilities and not much to commend it as a 'community'. 

I still have vivid memories of my mother walking up the hill to Kilmartin Terrace weighted down by heavy shopping bags, and with children in tow, as the nearest shops were twenty a good minute walk away.  

Yes the people who designed these communities, or 'deserts wi' windaes' (deserts with windows) as Billy Connolly famously called them, have a lot to answer for because they didn't live in housing schemes, of course, they lived in much nicer parts of Glasgow or in its leafy suburbs.    

And the Red Road flats were a much worse environment for families to live in than Arden, so I'm glad I didn't spend any of my formative years there - hundreds of feet into the air with few amenities in the local area.

So I think bringing them down with a bang is a great idea and as they all crash to the ground in a great cloud of dust, I will reflect on the fact that the municipal socialism of Glasgow City Council which has endured for the past 50 years is responsible for these monstrous living conditions.  

The city fathers and its many politicians should all be ashamed of themselves, if you ask me.