Bloomberg

John Delacourt

November 2, 2021

The 26th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), or COP26, as it is better known, is now underway. And much has been made about the fact that this meeting will be different. The pandemic has underscored how global crises can scale up and send governments scrambling. Massive, systemic collapse of the services and supply chains that sustain us is all too real a prospect. We’ve lived through a dress rehearsal of what might be coming, with one important caveat. As Mark Carney put it, soon after leaving his old job heading up the Bank of England, there is no possibility of self-isolating from the perils of environmental crisis.

It is all too apparent that bold thinking, an impatience with platitudes and a willingness to rip up the old scripts of transactional politics are required more than ever. Credit Greta Thunberg and her increasingly influential supporters for making an impact. This is why there may be no more appropriate a setting for this meeting, with all its purported momentousness, than Glasgow.

The city’s just 650 kilometres from London, with a population of a little more than half a million. But, pre-eminent among the northern capitals in the post-Brexit, less-than-united kingdom, Glasgow has an independent sensibility forged in the blast furnace of post-imperial decline. Glasgow’s stuttering economic resurrection, however modest, makes it an outlier and early adopter, by necessity, of the outward-looking, out-of-the-box strategies that might enable a smart recovery from the ravages of the pandemic.

I first got to know Glasgow as a boy, because it was the city where my father grew up and proudly took us back to visit. In his lifetime, it had gone from the Dickensian conditions of the Depression, through the last hurrah of the shipbuilding industry along the Clyde River, and then through a post-war period where the class divisions were only sharpened. Upward mobility happened elsewhere; for many, in places like Canada in the 1950s.

My father told us about how Labour Prime Minister Clement Atlee, who succeeded Winston Churchill in 1945, nationalized about twenty percent of the economy, including with the formation of the revered National Health Service. Then, with Attlee voted out, there was an abrupt reversal of these efforts, and Glasgow, no longer an industrial powerhouse, could not – and did not – adapt well to such a tumultuous period of change. A long period of industrial decline ensued.

The revolutionary impact of a new, economically empowered middle class was not felt quite so powerfully north of Hadrian’s Wall. Decades on from Glasgow’s best years, you could still feel the influence of the old city fathers of the banking district and the guilds keeping the lights on behind the grand, Victorian facades of Argyle and Sauchiehall streets. Meanwhile, the rougher neighbourhoods of tenements were bulldozed to quell the entrepreneurial spirit of the “criminal underclass.”

During the 50s and 60s, whole neighbourhoods were re-housed in high-rise blocks, or “high flats” as Glaswegians call them (some of the best writing evocative of these decades can be found in the crime fiction of Denise Mina and William McIllvaney). Yet those high rises, in all their brutalist glory, only served to foment some of the worst outcomes for quality of life.

Glasgow’s stuttering economic resurrection, however modest, makes it an outlier and early adopter, by necessity, of the outward-looking, out-of-the-box strategies that might enable a smart recovery from the ravages of the pandemic.

Case in point is the phenomenon called “The Glasgow effect,” where to this day there is a significantly lower life expectancy for the city’s residents, especially men, in comparison to other European cities. One in four men in in Glasgow won’t live to see his 65^th birthday.

How marked is the contrast between Glasgow and, say, a Leipzig or Gothenburg, prosperous European cities of a similar size? Sometimes the driest reports can be the most evocative. From the Wikipedia entry for “Glasgow effect”:

“Several hypotheses have been proposed to account for the ill health, including the practice in the 1960s and 1970s of offering young, skilled workers in Glasgow social housing in new towns, leaving behind a demographically ‘unbalanced population.’ Other suggested factors have included a high prevalence of premature and low birthweight births, land contaminated by toxins, a high level of derelict land, more deindustrialization than in comparable cities, poor social housing, religious sectarianism, lack of social mobility, soft water, vitamin D deficiency, cold winters, higher levels of poverty than the figures suggest, adverse childhood experiences and childhood stress, high levels of stress in general and social alienation.”

Given all these factors, you’d think it would be a city of broken spirit. But it remains a tough, resilient town by necessity. In popular culture — from Douglas Stuart’s Booker Prize-winning novel Shuggie Bain to what was surely the only Anthony Bourdain episode to include a master class in how to defend yourself in a knife fight — the city’s grit is well-chronicled and romanticized. It’s an attitude perhaps best captured by the “Glasgow kiss”: a cracking head-butt to the bridge of the nose.

The Glasgow welcome for the fool who’d put on airs in the local is appropriately picturesque: “Pick a window, you’re leaving.” Yet for those who haven’t been compelled to leave by such means or any other, the texture of its culture, the authenticity it demands of those who’d love its neighbourhoods so fiercely, might just be its source of hope, and provide the spark for its innovation and remaking.

Case in point is how the Glasgow Housing Authorities have reclaimed the tenement neighbourhoods that have stubbornly remained. The regeneration developments near the city centre provide strong case studies in community rebuilding for Canada’s new federal housing minister.

And all of this reimagining is happening in tandem with the Sustainable Glasgow initiative, whose mission is “to make Glasgow a world-leading centre for sustainable policy, innovation and action.” This isn’t just empty rhetoric; it helped the city achieve its 2020 target of reducing CO2 emissions by 30 percent. This partnership, led by a local council, is now setting its sights on Glasgow becoming net-zero carbon by 2030.

Their work is focused on everything from the installation of LED street lights to climate-friendly infrastructure. That includes energy efficient renovation of whole neighbourhood blocks, the expansion of the network of electric-car charging points, and “The creation of renewable energy schemes, green jobs, and large-scale climate neutral approaches to city transformation.”

Adam Smith, author of The Wealth of Nations, who studied at the University of Glasgow before heading to Balliol College at Oxford, did not, as is often claimed, trust everything to the market per a common misreading of his famous “invisible hand” theory of greater interest ultimately served by self-interest. As Mariana Mazzucato confirms, in her own classic economic text The Value of Everything, “Far from leaving everything to the market, he thinks of himself as giving guidance to statesmen on how to act both to enrich the people and the sovereign.” If Smith were in Glasgow for COP26, I’m betting he’d see much to hope for in the efforts of the former, and great cause for hope in how they might bring the world along to the Glasgow way of thinking.

Policy Contributing Writer John Delacourt is Vice President and Group Leader of Hill + Knowlton public affairs practice in Ottawa. He is also the author of the novels Ocular Proof, Black Irises and Butterfly.