WHILE Comrade Sheridan and his shock troops were breaching the peace of George Square and preventing most of the Glasgow City Council getting to their crucial budget meeting, I was closeted with a group of police officers on a training course, listening to them discuss their public relations role.
It was instructive. It helped me to understand why their colleagues in George Square had not clapped Pollok's premier in irons and turned water cannon on his supporters. As the ghastly Trial by Night television programme proved, in which he argued his case before Scottish Television's answer to a guillotine mob, Comrade Sheridan's brand of extremism commands support among those who find it easier to play the part of oppressed underlings than try to find practical solutions.
The most likely reason for non-intervention in George Square is that the police are now trained to be much more sensitive to public reactions. That's generally a good thing, but of course I wasn't one of the councillors who was duffed up and prevented from getting in the City Chambers.
The next evening I attended the meeting of another ruling body in Glasgow. No-one seems to want to prevent Glasgow presbyters from entering their debating chamber (not even the disgruntled denizens of Dennistoun who were there to see one of their kirks voted into oblivion), but there was an ominous echo of the council cuts.
The Rev Keith Steven told us of a possible threat to those who act as trustees for projects which depend on grant funding. The cuts would take away the funds but the staff in these projects might demand severance and redundancy payments for which the trustees would be legally liable. People who thought they were doing everyone a good turn might thereby be made bankrupt by the very workers whose jobs they had created.
Yes, the issue of cuts and council tax increases is not a simple one, despite what the demagogues will tell you. That truth will emerge even more clearly if a Labour Government is elected at Westminster, removing the excuse at a stroke that all the ills of the West of Scotland are due to Tory policies. Responsible politicians know perfectly well that most of the problems facing our society will not be remedied by throwing more and more money at them.
An excellent example of this is care of the elderly. It is the very success of the health service in raising life expectancy that is causing part of the problem. What about the solution? There we enter muddier waters, but after a visit to Cathcart this week I am a little wiser about growing older. The occasion was a conference on community care organised by Cathcart Old Kirk minister the Rev Neil Galbraith (who last popped up in this column in his days at Blawarthill). Neil has obviously not lost his appetite for mixing together politicians, care agencies, care professions in a conference format, feeding them well, and emphasising practical concerns as well as prayerful ones.
You can't get much more practical than a local undertaker, a firm which sells equipment for disability, the man who runs the council system which has installed 15,000 alarm pull-cords in Glasgow's council homes. The 24-hour alarm facility could easily be sold as a benefit to private sector tenants and owner-occupiers but this is apparently not possible under present rules.
We heard from the man who heads the Victoria hospital trust geriatric services about some advances in medicines for diseases prevalent in old age, and from a pharmacist about the advantages to older people of ''signing on'' with one local pharmacy who would be able to offer personalised services. The relative costs of home care, nursing home care, etc, were laid out for us, and by implication the way in which the impact of community care policies have changed the market-place of elderly care provision. I left wondering why do we not have more of this kind of thing, and less of the George Square way of solving things. Churches are ideally placed to be the brokers of such teach-ins, and would be able to ensure that they were kept apolitical and practical. However, should Cathcart Old be the scene of future such events, it would be intensely practical to offer cushions or tubes of Preparation-H
to those who have to sit for more than half an hour in its oak pews.
Of course, seminars do not suit those who are fighting a class war, or a patriotic war. They are not interested in the dull process of compromise, the unglorious business of mutual respect. The danger is that they will seem more exciting and sensational to those unwilling to spend time and energy on the boring pursuits of democracy and decency and we will be left with a society in which important issues are decided in private by bureaucrats, who speak an impenetrable language of socio-legalspeak, and then debated in public in a Kilroy-Trial by Night-Esther Rantzen kind of way.
Happily we are not yet there. If this week has shown anything, it is that events in Dunblane one year ago still weigh heavy on our society. That is to be welcomed. As the minister of King's Park parish remarked to me at the Cathcart conference, ''There is a huge amount of compassion in our society, awaiting an outlet.'' If we have the sense to prefer compassion to passion, a few community halls may close and a few community workers lose their jobs, but care in the community will not cease with them.
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