In Escape From New York, John Carpenter's malevolent and under-rated 1981 classic, Manhattan has become a walled penitentiary where America's most violent criminals are deposited and then forgotten. What social structure that exists is administered with extreme prejudice by the Duke, the meanest, baddest, smartest "mutha" in the joint. When the president's plane crashes inside the city limits, Kurt Russell, a Purple Heart hero gone bad, is given 24 hours to rescue his unappreciative leader.
Many who have been enthralled by Carpenter's dystopian vision of law and order in a dim future have observed all sorts of social and apocalyptic messages in the film. Sometimes, though, it's best simply to sit back and enjoy 99 minutes of stygian menace, grotesque humour and the coolest soundtrack in Hollywood history.
Then another set of statistics is released indicating that the north-east of Glasgow has been cast adrift from civilisation and I think of Carpenter's vision. Polite society seems carefully to be walking backwards away from this area of Glasgow in the manner of one who has just encountered an unleashed rottweiler. Last week, we learned that more than a third of people in this benighted area do not have a single school qualification between them – the lowest rating in the UK. Indeed, every one of Glasgow's constituencies was placed below the British average while every Edinburgh constituency appeared in the top third for academic attainment.
Part of the SNP's great four-year confidence trick on the Scottish public is the way it has perfected the art of the vapid and supercilious responses even in the face of a genuinely catastrophic social revelation such as this. "The Scottish government is committed to raising attainment and ambition across the board." Translated, this simply means: "Who cares?"
In each of those countries affected by the Arab Spring, we are told that the people are fed up with corruption, low wages, scarcity of goods and the violence of the security forces. Yet in Syria, Libya, Lebanon and Algeria, adults will live 10 years longer than in parts of Glasgow.
The SNP, though, is simply the latest Scottish and British administration which has disengaged from the problems of this neighbourhood. In the last 30 years, Glasgow's East End has reached a point where it now always records the worst score in every social indicator of poverty and deprivation. Worklessness, life expectancy, cancer, heart disease, knife crime, educational attainment, drug abuse, single-parent families, people claiming benefits – Glasgow's East End is dying a very slow and painful death.
Meanwhile in Edinburgh, there is an edifying vignette of stories that will help us all mind the poverty gap. A couple of publicly funded heritage groups are squabbling over a multimillion redevelopment of one patch: Charlotte Square. It seems that some mews cottages are in the line of fire and this has shaken the Barbouratti to the very depths of their foundation garments. Round the corner, an artist is putting the finishing touches to a 10-year project to depict biblical scenes out of matches and wastepaper. The council has contributed ?120k to this. And down the road (Edinburgh is a very small city), the royal family is preparing to annex the Canongate for a private wedding ceremony of someone who is about 10th in line to the throne. This is expected to cost us around ?500k.
The Edinburgh international festival will begin in earnest next week and will soak up another ?6m of public funds while generating incalculable economic benefits for one of the richest cities in Europe. Scotland's three national galleries, every one of them in Edinburgh, will attract the gaze of many of the festival tourists.
I stand in no one's shadow when it comes to my admiration and love for our capital city and, indeed, I am already organising a couple of wee peregrinations to the Shortbread City for the purposes of getting cultured during the festival. Rarely in the civilised world will you find a community epitomising blight, deprivation and death living so close to one that represents privilege, wealth and beauty. It must be a core responsibility of government to seek ways of bridging this chasm between Scotland's haves and have-nots.
Here, though, is what has been engaging the SNP government while this obscenity on its doorstep has gradually been revealed: a 40-point plan that will jail poor people for singing off-colour songs; fighting the Crown Estates for more revenue and expressing outrage that the Electoral Commission may be put in charge of the independence referendum.
In the weeks ahead, we will encounter more public sector strikes following the announcement of a plan to make workers pay more and work longer for their pensions. We will also be told how the economy of Scotland, and Glasgow in particular, has been gelded by the existence of such a large public sector and its "index-linked" pensions, as if no one is entitled to such a thing these days. We have such a large public sector because many people in Scotland, and especially in Glasgow, are in need of state intervention. They are poor, infirm and live in bad places. The circumstances of poverty and deprivation in many neighbourhoods going back 150 years are congenital. Most of those killed in our two world wars were poor and working class and Glasgow had more of these than most as they had flooded in to satisfy the demands of the ship, steel and coal industries. For decades, they had endured slave wages, crowded slums and no paid holidays.
Their privations funded the lifestyles of the merchant class and built the military hardware that defeated a kaiser and a fuhrer. Generations of poor people who live beyond Glasgow Cross have been viewed as expendable by our governments; it has been no great mischief when they have fallen. There were never any war reparations or rebuilding programmes to make amends for the years of sacrifice of these people and the generations of torture they endured at the hands of those whose fortunes they built.
We have been building a wall around the north-east of Glasgow and soon it will be so tall that we will be spared sight of their squalid little lives. If this government held a poverty summit and ceased its worthless sectarian posturing, and if the plight of our urban poor was made an urgent priority, then it will be entitled to have its independent Scotland.
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