SNP Neglect and Abandonment, Nicola Sturgeon’s Govanhill defence leaves residents of the Govanhill ghetto totally unimpressed, the problem is leadership and her elected SNP ‘pals’ aren't up to the job, a few wheelie bins, an upgraded cleansing service and a new cycle route would bring in gentrification of the area, could Nicola Sturgeon face being back on the Holyrood list?

Dear All

Govanhill is a byword for political neglect in Scotland.

Govanhill falls within the constituency of SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon, but far from being an area which is pristine, the Nationalist leader has left the area to run down and become crime ridden.

Govanhill is now Scotland's first third world ghetto!

Recently SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon used the press to do a piece in a Sunday newspaper to insist she was working on problems in Govanhill, frankly her defence of her representation of the Glasgow Southside seat is bizarre.

One of the SNP Councillors in the area is the woefully inept Mhairi Hunter, if you check her register of interests on the council website, you can see that Hunter gets well paid for her political offices as well as being paid as an SNP Councillor, she has these ‘jobs’:

P/T Constituency Assistant to Nicola Sturgeon MSP
Co-chair Glasgow City Integration Joint Board
Board Member NHS Greater Glasgow & Clyde Health Board

Incredibly isn’t it, not the jobs, but how someone so dense gets these positions, but in case you think it is a mystery, allow me to help, Mhairi Hunter is Nicola Sturgeon’s pal, and has been her election agent in the past. In the old days, you heard the phrase ‘jobs for the boys’ in this case, it is very much ‘jobs for the girls’.

The fact that Nicola Sturgeon has been forced to defend the management of her ghetto at the heart of her constituency after repeated complaints from residents shows that the work of ‘Let’s Save Govanhill’ is working. I suspect that her renew interest in the area goes beyond a PR exercise, I suspect that the SNP vote is falling to a point that possibly could see Nicola Sturgeon go back on the Holyrood list to be an MSP.

The fight to rid Govanhill of Nicola Sturgeon is one of the greatest challenges that other political parties have more or less ignored.

Unsurprisingly the residents are highly unimpressed with Sturgeon's Govanhill defence. The squalor and filthy in the area requires action, action which Nicola Sturgeon refuses to take, along with her SNP Council led by the ineffective Susan Aitken. The SNP are masters at the shallow public relations exercise, but despite this residents have made an impressive impact and case for action.

Most of the political representation in the Glasgow Southside seat is SNP, there is no excuse that Nicola Sturgeon can give, no one else to blame, no pointing the finger at Westminster and no pointing the finger at Holyrood.

This time the blame entirely lies with Nicola Sturgeon.

One thing which Sturgeon did say is that rumours that the area’s slum and infested tenements are to be bulldozed are wrong.  Sturgeon said she was “well aware that Govanhill faces some very specific challenges”, but what are these ‘specific challenges’? It seems that the SNP leader knows them but isn’t willing to publicly talk about them.

The answer is migrants; migrants turned Govanhill into a third world ghetto, along with Muslim slum landlords who failed to keep up the maintenance of their properties. The high ethic vote which Nicola Sturgeon depends on is said by some to be one of the reasons for the inactivity of the SNP leader and the elected Councillors to take a leadership role.

So, what is the ‘Sturgeon defence’?

Well, the defence is based on doing the least amount of work to appear active such as:

A clampdown on rogue landlords,
A unique cleansing service to fight fly-tipping,
New wheelie bins to help solve problems with “vermin”.
A new cycle route

Yes, clearly the SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon and her other elected SNP cohorts are clearly out of their depth, her defence is risible. The idea that a cycle route is attracting people and businesses to the area is quite frankly laughable; a cycle route through the ghetto means suddenly it will become gentrified?

Does that mean Govanhill will become as trendy as Glasgow’s ‘West End’?

Nicola Sturgeon doesn’t give a monkey’s cuss about Govanhill, but Sturgeon has plenty of time for LGBT events, she has plenty of time to travel to London to watch the Tennis, she has plenty of time to travel to Brussels to give speeches, but the truth is that she has limited time for the people of Govanhill.

Fiona Jordan, of the Let’s Save Govanhill campaign group, said Ms Sturgeon’s comments reminded her of Nero fiddling while Rome burned.

She said:

“That article is an exercise in damage limitation by Nicola Sturgeon and her PR team. In the real world, Nicola should tell us the outcomes for the millions of pounds that have been spent in Govanhill. It has been nothing more than a band-aid to cover up or deflect from her dereliction of duty and failure to manage Govanhill. She has overseen the creation of a ghetto in 21st century Scotland and we have to live in it.”

Fiona Jordan is right about Nicola Sturgeon fiddling like Nero while Rome burned, her SNP elected officials aren’t fit for purpose, the obscene fact her ‘pal’ Mhairi Hunter is listed as a PT Constituency Assistant to Nicola Sturgeon and a councillor for the same area is a sick joke.

Given that Nicola Sturgeon felt compelled to publicly write her defence in the papers says a lot to me, it says that the SNP vote in the area is going down; it says to me that the SNP lies of being there to help have exploded in her face.

Govanhill is an area that needs stern measures taken against the ‘specific challenges’, the supposed crackdown on slum landlords isn’t really a crackdown. Glasgow City Council has set aside the money to buy up 500 properties in the Govanhill. In the press, it was hyped that these properties were seized in fact the slum landlords actually received a windfall courtesy of Nicola Sturgeon.

If you wonder why Nicola Sturgeon has been less than sterling in her efforts to fix Govanhill, why not have to look at the names of some of the banned slum landlords such as Usman Ul Haq, Abid Mahmood, Abdul Ali, Shazia Akhtar, Abdul Shakoor and Furrukh Saleem and then form your own opinion about the lack of action.

The credit for raising the profile and scale of the problems in Govanhill deservedly goes to Let’s Save Govanhill campaign group and their spokesperson Fiona Jordan, not the SNP MSP Nicola Sturgeon, not to the SNP MP Alison Thewliss, nor SNP Cllrs Mhairi Hunter and Alexander Belic.

On the Glasgow City Council website, SNP Cllr Mhairi Hunter is listed as a carer for her elderly father, one wonders given the state of ‘care’ she has delivered for residents in Govanhill, what are the conditions for the elderly father like?

Do you think he lives surrounded by rubbish and faeces as the residents of Govanhill do?

Finally, in one video when the residents group wanted to speak to Mhairi Hunter, she disappeared rather quickly shouting, 'am in a hurry', ....... busy doing nothing, working the whole day through, she like to be able to do the job...... but is more suited to using the loo!

Yours sincerely

George Laird
The Campaign for Human Rights at Glasgow University