A calamitous Sunday in Glasgow should raise more than an eyebrow over the consequences of the Government’s policy decisions in the areas of health, fire and policing, argues Herald columnist Calum Steele

Governments reaping the whirlwinds of their political choices are quite a rare thing. The electoral cycle always moves on, leaving the long-term consequences of short-term policies a problem for future administrations to face and try to deal with. There are, as always, exceptions that prove the rule – to a point at least – as the miner’s strike for Margaret Thatcher showed. But even then, the generational poverty and all the problems that brought, created by massive unemployment and deindustrialisation, continue to be felt to this day.

So too the depletion of our armed forces, which have been in steady decline ever since the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and whilst almost all the cuts have taken place under Conservative governments, it is Keir Starmer who is now in the hot seat as the barrage of criticism over the capability of the nation to protect itself comes sharply into focus at a time of unprecedented global instability. As two things can be true at once, it is the Trump presidency that has simultaneously exposed the fragility of the nation’s military capacity whilst contributing exponentially to the chaos underpinning the urgency with which it undoubtedly requires to be addressed.

When you add the austerity policies of George Osborne and Danny Alexander, the chaos and devastation of Iraq, the Brexit “success” of Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson, and the economic incoherence of Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng into the mix, it would not be unfair to conclude that decades of cumulative policy failures have led us to the point where confidence that things can be turned around is as low now as at any point in living memory.

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Closer to home, our own Scottish Government is one of the longest-serving consecutive governments anywhere in the United Kingdom over the past 300 years. That leads to a certain inevitability that policies of the past can come back and bite you on the backside. And as recent events show, they have done so with considerable gusto.

The tragedy of the death of a man outside the Thistle (safe) drug consumption room, the pitiful and disgraceful scenes at Ibrox, and the too-horrific-for-words fire which devastated Union Corner on Union Street – all in Glasgow, all on Sunday – should lead to more than an eyebrow being raised over the consequences of the Government’s policy decisions in the areas of health, fire and policing.

For too long now, the impacts of cuts to police and fire services have been swatted away with tedious lines about operational decisions for the respective chiefs, record funding (not true in real terms), and being better than other parts of the UK. I’m sure the business owners who have had their livelihoods turned upside down and don’t know how they will pay their bills or mortgages, the tens of thousands of commuters who now face weeks if not months of disruption to get to work, and the steward who was violently assaulted all take solace from that.

The poverty and deprivation which lies at the heart of Scotland’s shameful drug deaths were not created by this Government, but it has had close to two decades to try to address them. As the pay bill for the drugs support and advocacy sector has grown at a speed matched only by drug death numbers themselves, treatment and rehabilitation inexplicably remain dirty words to a government more in thrall to its lobbyists than the families of the dead – not one of whom a minister could name.

The Fire Brigade Union don’t need me to advance their arguments over the consequences of cutbacks any more than the Scottish Police Federation do, and of course there is no way of knowing if a decade of cuts made fighting the fire at Union Street any harder – but it’s safe to assume it didn’t make it easier, and in any event wouldn’t it be good not to have to wonder? Like the police service, the fire service is facing a bleak funding future with fewer appliances and personnel to staff them. A government quite literally playing with fire will eventually get burnt.

Predictably perhaps, it is the future of policing that concerns me most. The fundamental duty of a government to keep its people safe starts with policing, and every warning about the decreasing ability of our national service to do so keeps falling on deaf ears. The downright scummy and thuggish behaviour of too large a minority of football fans has led to the deployment of many hackneyed lines and promises of reviews and justice, and entirely on cue the criticism of policing and stewarding has followed.

The police service can never publicly admit it can’t cope with the demands of a football match between Rangers and Celtic, but as the levels of disorder and propensity to violence increase, those demands become ever harder to satisfy. There is an undoubted rot at the core of the ultras sections of both fan groups, and too many strive to give them legitimacy they simply do not deserve. Tackling them requires the same no-nonsense policing approaches that drove out football violence in the 1990s. This, however, is another area where political policy hampers the police’s ability to do so, as locking hoodlums up in cells to bring them before the courts is no longer considered fashionable or in keeping with the nation we want to become (whatever that means).

Police officers face up to fans on the pitch at Ibrox on Sunday (Image: PA)

There is a danger in presenting the challenges facing policing as all being based around football. They are so much more than that. Alcohol-fuelled violence across our country is quickly being replaced by drug-fuelled violence, and as policy shifts towards an increasingly laissez-faire attitude to drugs, the harder it is to stop. Organised crime thrives where policing is weak, and weak policing is an inevitable symptom of cuts and wider failures in the justice system.

For too long, governments have chased short-term “wins” while ignoring the long-term consequences. Cuts to police, fire, and public services leave communities exposed and vulnerable. Headlines always follow tragedies and bad news. One Sunday in Glasgow with death, fire, and chaos should serve as a warning: safety cannot be sacrificed for political short termism.

Calum Steele is a former General Secretary of the Scottish Police Federation, and former general secretary of the International Council of Police Representative Associations. He remains an advisor to both.

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