Reporting perils, fishing the Kelvin, and more Humble Yum

What I’ve been writing

Something I hope you’ve noticed is that now, on Mondays and Wednesdays, we bring you a chunkier Glasgow in Brief, with beefed up original reporting. When I joined, I didn’t expect this to take up so much of my time but I also didn’t expect it to be as rewarding and impactful as it is. We make a formidable team that can produce these newsy rundowns twice weekly, on top of our other output. 

This brings me on to Monday’s story — our exclusive, revealing that one of the men behind the saltires being raised across Glasgow is a Neo-Nazi... Certainly, many who are raising the saltires across north Glasgow will share the vast majority of concerns with everyone — unaffordable and unavailable housing, NHS waiting lists, deteriorating standards of living, mental health crises, all of which appear to get little more than lip service from local and national politicians. When I hear people voice these concerns my immediate instinct is to empathise; I’ve been told this is characteristic of a good journalist. We listen and try not to judge, not until we have all the facts.

People still feel judged anyway though. On Monday, I got in touch with the Tartan Team — the group who’ve claimed responsibility for hanging hundreds of saltires from lampposts across north Glasgow, mirroring the St George’s Crosses going up around England.

The anonymous ‘Team’ representative I spoke with talked a good, PR-friendly game about being primarily concerned with the deteriorating standards of living they see on a daily basis in their communities of Milton, Summerston, Cadder, and Maryhill. They even said they oppose protesting outside of asylum hotels and that “immigration isn’t a problem” for them — a noticeable break with the parallel English movement which is accompanied by an express call to ‘stop the boats’ and remigrate large numbers of migrants and refugees.

I went into this chat with an open mind. But then we did some more digging, our research uncovering a social media account that appeared to belong to one of the Tartan Team’s founding members. The account espoused extremist far-right views, the kind classed as ‘Neo-Nazi’. Here were more of those pesky little facts; I did my job and reported them.

The Tartan Team weren’t very happy; despite offering multiple opportunities for comment, they deferred. Instead, following the report’s publication, one of their number commented online that I needed my “hard drives checked”. As right of reply responses go, the inference I was a paedophile was a new one. But it’s all part of the job. And we got off lightly compared to colleagues in Manchester, you can even listen to what their flag-raising organiser had to say after being exposed. 

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