GLASGOW'S Pollok Park is truly great. Areas of almost true wilderness, well-maintained paths and cycle tracks, formal gardens, and a free museum full of artefacts and artworks from the ancient Egyptians to the French Impressionists. It has always amazed me that it's run by the council (formerly privately owned, it was gifted to the people of Glasgow in 1966). Given that most council jobs involve clearing up the human mess in an impoverished city, I often marvel at what an extrem
"Whit you doin the day, Tommy?"
"Plantin' crocuses, whit 'bout you, Tam?"
"Takin' the horses for a stroll and feedin' the Highland cows."
Pollok Park is almost a vision of socialist heaven, which is why it always depresses me to drive ba
ck via the Clyde Tunnel and witness parts of Ibrox that could only be described as hell. I noticed, this month, that the housing scheme by the side of the road – burned out, graffitied and boarded up for many years – has finally been demolished. The end of that particular dream of housing the masses has still got a long way to go, before it can be replaced with some other vision of the future. And it always begs the question: what's going to happen to the urban poor who have to be re-housed? Just giving them new homes doesn't solve their problems: third-generation unemployment, drug and alcohol addiction, illiteracy, endemic violence – the facts have at times driven many of us, including me, to spouting world-weary cliches like: "I know, I know, but what can be done?"
So last week, in Pollok Park, beneath the cherry blossoms, I began brainstorming with my girlfriend.
"Maybe the long-term unemployed could be put to work in the park?" she suggested.
"It's not that simple. You can't just give jobs to folk who've been dependent on state benefits for generations."
"Well, maybe you could make them work. I mean, here, weeding, planting, trimming the bushes. How bad could that really be?"
"Make them work?" I replied. "What is this, a dictatorship?"
She looked up at the cherry blossoms and said: "It seems a pretty benevolent dictatorship to me."
A crazy idea, but on the way back home we debated it. What with the news about the projected scrapping of incapacity benefit and the possible creation of a US-style enforced work-for-welfare system, and all the eco-ideology, it was maybe only a matter of time until the government started thinking along similar lines.
A fresh start for those without hope, in a rural idyll, albeit in enforced employment. I thought this sounded familiar though, and not in a good way, so I did a Google search of key words from our chat. Wikipedia came up and there it was.
The return to nature as a revolutionary solution; the masses put to work in rural areas; the creation of a new agrarian revolution; starting the entire culture again from day one, year zero. The mastermind behind the ideal was a communist called Pol Pot and he murdered 1.7 million Cambodians between 1976 and 1979.
"I think you should look at this before we propose it to my MP," I said wearily.
The full article contains 555 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
