Glasgow can flourish again but political promises of assistance will be hollow until our emergency services and local government receive the proper funding they are due, writes Roz Foyer

The black smoke that viciously billowed into the night last week, intertwined with fire orange specks of flame, has cleared. Rubble and ruin remain. There’s a thick smell in the air – River Clyde sewage combined with chemicals hardly compliments the nostrils.

Glaswegians have it in us to rebuild. We’ve done it before. This time will be no different.

It’s a split-second decision to see danger and flock to it, not flee. Yet it was the denizens and dwellers of the city that first took it on.  The bystanders and the onlookers rushing for help whilst a hellscape inferno started to roar. People like Lamin Kongira. People like James Welch. 

Ratcliffe’s rants fuel Reform’s dangerous myths on migration

Stop the politics — the Epstein scandal is about survivors, not men

Storm clouds gather over offshore wind as developers warn of crisis

Why Trump’s America is not an ally of the UK

They’re the people who embody the best of us. The ones who stand stall whilst the building starts to crumble.  The ones who lend a helping hand whilst fingertips are being burned; that includes the spontaneous, organic offers of help, emanating from social media, from surrounding businesses and workplaces to offer up space and resources to the impacted business owners of Union Street.

Praise, of course, also goes to the first responders. The heroism of the paramedics, the emergency services and of Police Scotland officers who, incidentally, had their limits already tested with a heated football game that afternoon at Ibrox.

But carrying the weight of the task are the members of the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service. More than 250 firefighters with 18 fire appliances and specialist equipment on the scene within minutes. Unparalleled swathes of support must be showered upon those firefighters who fought for days to bring the blaze to an end. But kind tweets and press niceties pale in comparison to actual funding which shows our support in real terms.

The Fire Brigades Union estimate that 1246 firefighters have been lost to the service in Scotland since 2010.  There are fewer fire appliances than there used to be and those that we do have are limited by the lack of firefighters to staff them. Pump capacity is more sparsely spread across Scotland. We can only speculate at this point as to what might have been saved with more capacity.  What we do know for sure is that as capacity was rushed into Glasgow, outlying areas were left exposed to greater risk.  Firefighters have long sounded the alarm over cuts to their service. The FBU’s Cuts Leave Scars campaign shows that, in real terms, the annual SFRS budget is now over £58 million lower than it was in 2013.

Cuts like these come at a cost. Response times have lengthened by nearly 20%, meaning the life-saving help people depend on – the kind of help that James and Lamin stepped in to provide - is arriving later when it matters most.

It’s not just the fire service. Cuts across the entire spectrum of our public services are akin to pouring petrol on to the fire and wondering why it hasn’t been extinguished.

Local government, health and social care, education and more are all facing real challenges in recruitment and retention. Since 2008, total public sector headcount has fallen by 62,000 whilst public sector employment as a share of the overall workforce has fallen from 24% to 22% since 2010. This comes as the Finance Secretary, just a mere matter of months ago, admitted that Scotland’s public sector could be on the receiving end of 11,000 more job cuts.

You can’t cut your way out of a crisis and budget restrictions across departments and the calculated shrinkage of the state hardly acts as a firewall when our services are stretched in times of emergency.

Therefore, it’s deeply welcome that the First Minister has been on an emergency footing and looks set to make available the cash needed to Glasgow City Council to assist in the rebuild project. We would also support the calls from USDAW that workers and businesses in the surrounding areas receive financial assistance as a result of the lack of ongoing trading and work. The call for further scrutiny and legislation to be brought forward to impose checks and balances on shops selling vapes is not without merit either.

But whilst the full investigation into the cause of the blaze is underway and no one, least of all this columnist, should pre-empt the decision, we would offer a cautionary suggestion; legislation and regulation must be reinforced with the required resources.

If local authorities don’t then have the staff power – the public sector workforce - through planning officers, building inspectors, environmental health, trading standards and fire safety officers then well-meaning legislation to curb the danger of vape shops, or any other premises for that matter, will be exactly that – well-meaning. Nothing more

That’s not to say we’re anti-regulation – far from it. It would take a bizarre trade unionist to argue against measures that keep workers and the public safe. On the contrary, this shows the real need to uphold levels in our building and trading standards. It also offers a jab back at those on the political right – the brazen Reformists and bombastic Tories – who think that cutting regulation, safety and, what they term as ‘red tape bureaucracy’, unlocks economic growth. Ensuring the workforce is safe is not a barrier to the entrepreneurial spirit those in the upper reaches of our social classes think is lacking in Scotland. Safer workplaces are beneficial to the workforce, to society and to economic growth.

Thus from the ashes of Union Street, we must renew. Glasgow must flourish again and, if central government are serious about it, they’ll give the workers the firepower to achieve it.

Roz Foyer is general secretary of the STUC

© Herald Scotland