Promoting Decline: The Scottish Office, Glasgow and Urban Regeneration Policy, 1976–2001

Research has shown that the decline of Glasgow was actively promoted by Scotland’s national policy makers from the early 1960s, as part of a regional policy agenda, and in the face of understood highly adverse impacts on the city. This article focuses on the Scottish Office’s development of ‘urban regeneration’ policy from the mid-1980s, which took a palliative approach to urban decline, thereby precluding the possibility of regeneration. The resulting frustration led the City Council in the mid-1990s to conduct a campaign for policy change. This met with a very strong reassertion of Scottish Office control, with officials persuading the incoming Labour Secretary of State for Scotland in 1997 to take the offensive to Glasgow, removing strategy from the Council’s hands and avoiding any commitment to achieving regeneration. While there were some concessions to the city in this process, the policy only changed when it later became apparent that shifts in the global economy had rendered the Scottish regional policy agenda obsolete. All of this is of much more than historical interest; the effects continue in the excessive deprivation from which Glasgow still suffers, and indeed, subsequent developments suggest a continuing Scottish Government prejudice against Glasgow in the post-2010 austerity years.