Glasgow’s flag wars go global

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Today, we’ve got the strange case of a massive lamppost flag-related email campaign, some (finally) positive news about the displaced Albert Drive residents, and the latest reason for Glasgow to establish an official Whisky Quarter™.

🇵🇸 Flag politics continue to rage

In an unexpected update to this year’s lamppost-flag saga, The Bell, along with other news outlets, has received 548 (and counting) emails over the past day and a half from people calling for the Palestine-Saltire flags seen around town to be removed. The emails, in which we were CC’d, were sent to Glasgow city councillors. The contents spoke on behalf of Glasgow’s Jewish community who, the near-identical emails said, felt “real distress” from the hybrid flags, which can be seen from the West End to Victoria Road over to the Gallowgate — as well as in Auld Reekie. 

Edinburgh City Council received similar campaign emails, a Scotsman story reported on Monday, and will remove the flags which do not have their permission “in due course”. In response, the Jewish Council of Scotland provided a comment in which they expressed “gratitude” to the “hundreds of people who have been in contact to request this action”. The JCS added that the flags in Edinburgh “incite hatred”, “sow division” and exacerbate the “fears and concerns” of anti-semitic behaviour. 

The hundreds of emails we received all begin with: “Dear Ward 5 and Ward 10 Councillors”. Throughout the body text there are no references to local places where the flags are being flown beyond “Glasgow”. The emails all cite the sender’s opinion that public spaces must maintain “political neutrality”. They conclude, using language that suggests the sender is Glaswegian, that the matter concerns how “our city” manages “shared civic space”.

You might expect, then, the executive members of the Jewish Council of Scotland to be among the senders of at least a few emails. They aren’t. To date, none of the emails we received were from JCS execs, although one non-executive JCS Glasgow member did send an email. In fact, we searched for the names of 100 randomly selected emails and were only able to link five of them to people in Scotland, let alone Glasgow. A large number were from England and the USA, as well as Israel. Could Glasgow and its flags be the focal point of an international campaign to remove public displays of support for Palestine, or is it a few concerned Glaswegians who’ve garnered support from abroad?

One email sender who is local, Vicci Stein of Glasgow Friends of Israel, told The Bell that she is “extremely upset” seeing the Scot-Pal flags. She added that she “expects” many of the senders are “ex-pat Scots living in other areas of the UK”. Stein said she has received no response to her email from the council. You may recognise Vicci Stein from the booth she and her husband attend on Buchanan Street where they speak to members of the public about the Israel-Palestine conflict. Her husband, Sammy Stein, was quoted in The Herald (£) saying “there is no genocide happening in Gaza”. The organisations who disagree are too long to list in full, but include Genocide Watch, Human Rights Watch, Jewish Voice for Peace, the UN, Amnesty International, UNHRC, MSF and the International Association of Genocide Scholars.

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Hope for displaced residents after major breakthrough with insurer

🏠 There is tentative good news for the displaced Albert Drive residents, as policy liability has been formally accepted by their insurance provider, AXA. A quick recap: residents of 188 Albert Drive haven’t had access to their homes, even to retrieve belongings, since the adjacent corner tenement block collapsed in July. The building had been deemed too unsafe for them to enter, and residents have been in limbo while renting alternative homes, unsure whether their insurers will pay for the repairs. 

Now, not only have AXA accepted liability for the damage, but residents have received a report from Southside Housing Association, the factors, on the condition of their building. This comes a few days after we first wrote that residents felt the report was being withheld from them. In it, surveyors say that the building is in a “better condition than had been feared” and that the newly-exposed gable wall “did not exhibit signs of structural movement”. 

Residents remain cautious, however, and have been told by the loss adjuster that “discussions were still at an early stage”. Although policy liability has been accepted, owners have been told they may need to pay privately for some aspects of the reinstatement costs. Last week, Southside Housing Association held a meeting with AXA and Glasgow City Council, but the residents are yet to receive any updates. “We as residents/owners are kind of frozen out of the process,” Fergus Sinclair told us. While, Sinclair says, it’s “significant” that the report observes the building “appears to be in suitable condition to permit some controlled access for residents to remove belongings”, he questions why residents haven’t been allowed back in since the council and SHA received the report at the end of September. 

🥃 Thanks to a tip off from one of our readers, we were alerted to the fact the Bon Accord is moving to Hope Street. At least sort of. The family-run establishment, which has been stewarded by the McDonaghs for a quarter of a century, is moving out of its North Street premises. There has been a Bon Accord pub at 153 North Street since 1971, a time when it was a challenge to find a pint of cask ale in the city. Today, it is perhaps Glasgow’s best bar for ale, with up to eight cask taps on at a time. It also has one of the best whisky back bars in Scotland. Since the much-missed Paul McDonagh died in 2023, it has passed into the able hands of his son, Thomas. 

So why the move? McDonagh Jnr wanted to buy the Bon from its owner, Heineken, when the lease comes to an end in May 2026. They said no, so McDonagh decided to buy his own place: 183A Hope Street, formerly Swing jazz bar, right across from Glasgow’s other dram mecca, the Pot Still. “There’s nothing magical in this pub, the thing that’s magical is me, the customers and how the pub’s run — that’s the special thing about this pub, not the building,” he told The Bell. As for the new spot, expect the “exact same stuff — cask ale, malt whisky”. 

Our reader, Mark, told us he’d learned of the news sitting next to the whisky YouTuber Ralfy, whose view was that it was a “great opportunity” to create a “Whisky Zone”. Such a zone, Ralfy proposed, would be bounded by the Good Spirits Co and the Scotch Malt Whisky Society on Bath Street, and the Pot Still and new Bon Accord (name TBC) on Hope Street. We popped over to Good Spirits to get the lowdown, where we were reliably informed it was not Ralfy, but in fact their own Rod Graham who had the idea of creating a Glasgow Whisky Quarter™ — which The Bell heretofore wholeheartedly endorses. With McDonagh’s new spot opening, “we'll be truly spoiled for whisky bars,” Graham says. “And of course there’s us and the Whisky Shop and Robert Graham for full bottles … There's a bit of that teenage sense of excitement at having so many whisky choices so close at hand.” For Graham, he’ll know his grand vision has been realised when the Scotrail announcement changes to say, ‘Next stop Queen Street. Alight here for the Whisky Quarter’.

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