Dunglass Castle and monument on the banks of the River Clyde at Bowling could become a Memorial Park in honour of Charles Rennie Mackintosh.
NOTEBOOK by BILL HEANEY
Updated
Challenging. It’s one of the most used words in the dictionary of local government officials.
But beware of challenging. It usually means everything that could go wrong did go wrong and that time and money are being thrown at the project being referred to.
Usually that means lots of money, council tax money. Out the window. Wasted.
West Dunbartonshire Council would be as well going down to Bonhill Bridge and throwing a black bin bag full of £50 notes into the Leven.
And repeating the exercise at every bridge all the way down the river to the old Dumbarton Bridge and the meeting of the waters with the River Clyde.
The council say they have no money. What they mean is that don’t have money to earmark on wasteful projects that are – or will be – of no benefit to the community here.
Vision is a commodity in short supply around here. Barely visible doesn’t cut it.
I have just been looking again at the City Region project to which West Dunbartonshire has already contributed £6 million, and which Scottish Labour have claimed will be a vehicle to bring growth to the economy around here.
It’s a multi million £ plan to create an industrial estate on the site of the old Esso tank farm at Bowling, which is seriously polluted.
You have to wonder if no one has told them already that we have industrial estates large and small in abundance in this part of Dunbartonshire, where abandoned factories are lying empty. And have been for ages.
West Dunbartonshire has its own Rust Belt. We have factories in all shapes and sizes from Jamestown and Rosshead in the Vale of Leven to the industrial estate at Strathleven, complete with its own mansion house. We have factories coming out of our ears.
I can remember the halcyon days of Polaroid, Diamond Power, Westclox, Wiseman’s, Burroughs …
Those were great days when Dunbartonshire was a prestigious name, and when even the first man on the moon came to have a look around to view how successful we were.
Astronaut Neil Armstrong and astronomer Sir Patrick Moore on a visit to Westclox
What we are left with now is a motley collection of semi-derelict factories, where a handful of people are employing a few folk and scraping out a grant-aided living.
They probably take more out of the public purse by way of grants than they put into it in taxation.
And that’s what they call challenging. It’s like putting lipstick on a corpse to make it look as if something is happening when it’s not.
Nor is it ever likely to be. Not here, not now, not ever.
Someone should tell West Dunbartonshire Council that we don’t need new factories here.
Had it not been for Lord McFall, pictured right, and the Strathleven Generation Company who were behind the Kilmalid plan for the Aggreko factory and the major expansion of Allied Distillers to become Chivas and employ 1,000 people in the Scotch Whisky industry, we would most likely have been going around with the backside out of our trousers.
What we need is a project. Not one like President Donald Trump’s plan for Gaza. How disgraceful is that?
We need someone with vision. Someone who will come up with a plan to invest properly the £millions that will be poured into Bowling.
A plan such as creating Mackintosh Park on the Bowling shore at Dunglass Castle, where the world famous architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his wife Margaret lived when they got married at St Augustine’s Scottish Episcopal Church in Dumbarton High Street.
Something like a Mackintosh Trail from his neglected School of Art in Glasgow to his statue in the West End to Bowling to a new Memorial Park and on to St Augustine’s and The Hill House in Helensburgh.
It’s just a thought, but it’s a visionary project which wouldn’t turn out to be as “challenging” as the factories that will be determinedly built to lie unoccupied and eventually become derelict at Bowling.
We live in the past here when we should be looking to the future.
What would £44 million do for the Town Centre in Dumbarton? Or the deprived housing estates the Council conceals behind a fog of obfuscation and lies as to how things are there.
If you always do what you always did then you’ll always get what you always got.
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Coverage of the Israeli/Palestine war is seldom off our television screens. It’s out there, hour on hour, day after day. Death and destruction writ large, 44,000 people are dead, many more injured. Now Trump wants to turn Gaza into a holiday camp and use the bombed and beleaguered Palestinians as redcoats. Netanyahu is rubbing his hands with glee at the thought. The most recent news broadcast I heard on TV said their reporters couldn’t tell the full story of what was happening now because journalists had been banned from entering Gaza. Sounds a bit like West Dunbartonshire where the Council does it worst to keep not just the press but the public at bay. Will they once again put up the barriers to stop the public gaining rightful entry into their Dumbarton Church Street offices and Clydebank Town Hall when they are debating what the new council tax will be?
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