We have a prestige presence here — and we are determined to keep it, a vox pop in Glasgow’s posh suburbs has discovered, thanks to the city’s new and increasingly popular digital local newspaper The Bell, which is stacking up paid subscriptions by the day.
It is heartening to hear the public’s appreciation of the presence of a local newspaper that mirrors their views in its columns rather than one (or even two, maybe) that slavishly reflects the spin-doctored views of the elected members of their local council.
Mostly, that has got to do with the revenue these papers bring in from advertising and use to feather their own nests while refusing to employ and train enough staff to produce the kind of newspapers which Scotland had for many years a reason to be proud of.
Their millionaire owners know there is the prospect that they will lose considerable sums of money – that’s your money, income and council tax money – if they are considered too critical of the politicians in the areas their publications cover.
One shocking example of this came to light earlier this week when it was revealed that the Sun newspaper had been tipped off about the shameful behaviour of Russell Brand long before the police and powers that be decided to do anything to stop it.
The publishers of Walliams’ hugely successful books had interfered there in the certain knowledge a fortune would be lost by them if the public was told what the children’s author had been up to.
Another was when Donald Dewar, immortalised in a statue in Buchanan Street, threatened to withdraw the Labour Party’s advertising from the Glasgow Herald before an election.
The late, great Arnold Kemp told Dewar where to get off.
Nearer home, in Dumbarton High Street, a prominent businessman who owned successful shops in Dumbarton and Alexandria threatened to stop advertising in the local paper if we reported on a court case where he was charged with drunk driving.
That kind of thing goes on all the time, but the public seldom hears about it.
I have written in this column many times about the fact that I have been banned from asking important questions of West Dunbartonshire Council because they claim I interrupted a meeting.
The truth of the matter is that I didn’t. They were lying or mistaken when they said I had been disrespectful to the then Provost who chaired that meeting.
They banned me without taking the time to inquire into the facts of that matter. No elected member had a say in this; no committee ever approved the sanctions that were taken against me.
West Dunbartonshire Council is not democratic. It’s disgraceful that their ban continues until this very day, years and years later.
One comment readers will never hear from the West Dunbartonshire public is “we have a prestige presence here”. East Renfrewshire is another world entirely.
We may be living in the same country, but we’re on a different planet.
What we have here in Church Street is small-minded councillors and officers delivering abysmal public services for an extortionate amount of money.
The fact that committee conveners in the Scottish Parliament, which has responsibility for local government, are to receive an extra £15,000 a year on their already eye-watering salaries is just another indication that the public are ignored in this country.
One word from us and they do what they like to keep themselves in the very long queue for the Gravy Train, which calls at local and national government stations far too often for my liking.
And for yours, I hope.
by Beth Templeton in The Glasgow Bell
Meanwhile, let’s hear what The Bell reported on Saturday morning after a visit to “posh” East Renfrewshire.
“Well, you know, we have a prestige here”, a woman tells me matter-of-factly. We are standing on Fenwick Road in Giffnock, exactly one kilometer across the border. As this is a local authority border, it’s invisible to the naked eye. But to the residents of East Ren, it’s as hard as Checkpoint Charlie.
This is because Giffnock, I keep hearing, is a place with a certain reputation to uphold, whereas Glasgow is… Well, it would be rude to utter aloud. Having made the long trek from the city in question (all of 15 minutes on a ScotRail), I intend to get to the bottom of exactly what this means.
The woman I’m currently talking to is standing outside Giffnock station with her husband, who nods in agreement. She’s dressed elegantly, a Remembrance poppy adorning her black duffel jacket.
“And that prestige,” she continues, her lip curling slightly, suggesting my questions are beginning to wear thin, “well, that prestige is what keeps our house prices buoyant, our schools buoyant.”
“Look at Paisley, look at Alexandria. It’s a lot nicer here. We’d like it to stay that way,” she finishes. After our conversation, she tells me she’s actually catching the train into Glasgow. The irony, seemingly, is lost on her.
I’m in East Renfrewshire to find out how the other half live. Kidding (sort of). In actuality, I’m here because of a bold Scottish Government proposal that could see Scotland’s 32 local authorities condensed into somewhere between six and 10 larger regional councils.
Should the plans go ahead, East Renfrewshire could find itself sharing an authority with its less prestigious neighbour, Glasgow.
‘Hands Off East Ren’
Giffnock is not the sort of place that needs to announce its affluence. It is obvious, from the big Victorian and Edwardian villas set behind large lawns and guarded by pruned hedges. On Fenwick Road there are independent delis, jewelers and restaurants offering the sort of lunch that comes with a carefully arranged plate (and a gulp when the bill arrives).
The clientele, meanwhile, look as though they have somewhere respectable to be. These are the well-dressed parents, immaculate older couples and joggers in expensive-looking running gear. I inconvenience as many people as possible, politely explaining I’m a journalist. Most of them entertain me; some look at me like I have two heads. But a consensus emerges: East Renfrewshire wants little, if anything, to do with Glasgow [and even less to do with West Dunbartonshire].
In September, First Minister John Swinney announced major reforms to Scotland’s local government system. The proposals (later revealed to have been decided after just 75 minutes of conversation with civil servants) he wants to implement would see 32 local authorities massively cut down, replaced by bigger regional councils.
For those with long memories — or an interest in Scotland’s administrative history — these proposals bear more than a passing resemblance to the two-tier system that existed before the great local authority shake-up of 1996. Back then, regional authorities sat above district councils, with Strathclyde covering much of the west of Scotland. What is now East Renfrewshire used to be Eastwood, a district within the Strathclyde region.
This plan has faced fervent resistance. Just this week a petition and campaign were launched to “Save Rutherglen and Cambuslang”, but by far the strongest opposition has come from East Renfrewshire.
Enter McDougall, who immediately put his campaigning background to use, launching a new crusade: ‘Hands Off East Ren’. His opening salvo wasted little time establishing the stakes.
“One of the things that makes East Ren so special is that we have the highest performing schools in Scotland, confirmed again and again in glowing inspectors’ reports,” he wrote in a Facebook post on 26 September.
“The SNP’s proposal to abolish East Ren would see control of our schools transferred to failing Glasgow City Council.”
And just like that, what began as a discussion about council boundaries descended into a turf war, with one side seemingly convinced that being under the same umbrella as Glasgow might bring the whole neighbourhood down.
The conflict has only heated up since. “These proposals are a race to the bottom,” says East Renfrewshire council leader Owen O’Donnell. He’s sitting across from me in his sage-green office, outlining his position — often theatrically. “We won’t just sit back, we’ll go down fighting,” he pledges. He’s got cross-party support on that front — East Ren councillors have unanimously passed a motion opposing the government’s plans.
The reforms, believes O’Donnell, are only being pushed by a “small number of individuals”.
His main concern is that council services like social care and education will be impacted, and that local accountability will disappear. Councillor Katie Pragnell Lees raises the same points, explaining to me that East Renfrewshire has a unique situation when it comes to social care: a very young and very old population. It has the highest rates of people aged 90+ and under 16 in the country. East Ren’s social care performance is slightly higher than Glasgow’s, but the two areas are ranked first and second in Scotland.
These aren’t, O’Donnell insists, achievements that have happened by accident. The state of the council, he tells me, is the result of 30 years of hard work. A “hard graft” by the people working in local government, he says, that the Scottish Government “simply doesn’t understand”.
The statistics do show stark differences between the two neighbouring authorities. Glasgow has three times the percentage of children living in poverty compared to East Renfrewshire, and the gap is just as striking when you look at deprivation. According to the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation (SIMD), 45.4% of Glasgow’s neighbourhoods fall within Scotland’s most deprived 20%. In East Renfrewshire, it’s just 5.7%.
Despite these differences, the amount of government funding each council receives per person is surprisingly similar. For 2026/27, Glasgow receives around £3,153 per resident, compared with £3,248 in East Renfrewshire. That’s a difference of just £95 per person.
In other words, Glasgow is facing much higher levels of poverty and deprivation, but doesn’t get more money to deal with it.
From where East Renfrewshire’s leaders and populace are sitting, the area has spent decades building something rather special, only for the Scottish Government to arrive and suggest it might be better off sharing it with Glasgow.
A controversial history
To understand why East Renfrewshire is so fiercely protective of its independence, it’s worth looking at how it came to exist in the first place. The council is barely 30 years old, created in 1996 following the Conservative government’s sweeping reorganisation of Scottish local government, which abolished the powerful Strathclyde Regional Council.
The new authority was formed largely from the old Eastwood district, historically a Conservative stronghold, alongside parts of the former Renfrew district. The area was also affluent in comparison to Glasgow: 89% of households in Eastwood were owner-occupied, with only 8% of households being rented from the council.
East Renfrewshire also had a particularly high concentration of professional and managerial workers, which persists today: 38.5% of employed residents work in professional occupations, compared with 26.5% across Scotland.
One of the most notable criticisms was written in the Scottish Left Review which describes the boundary changes as an “electoral gerrymander”, arguing that the new boundaries incorporated areas with presumed Conservative voters, while Glasgow lost parts of its potential tax base. Regardless of intention, East Renfrewshire emerged with a distinctly different political, economic and social character from much of Glasgow.
A ‘not very bright’ council
That difference is glaring on the streets of Giffnock, where it’s hard to find anyone who’s positive about the prospect of joining Glasgow.
“Glasgow city council can’t even run their own city properly”, one woman tells me, adding: “In fact I’d say there are a lot of people on that council who are not very bright”. When I press her for examples of Glasgow’s mismanagement, she offers up the ongoing George Square revamp and “shocking” levels of deprivation. Glasgow, she warns, will take East Renfrewshire’s money and waste it.
Further up the road, it’s much of the same. “Glasgow running East Ren?” laughs an elderly woman wrapped in a camel-coloured coat. When asked, she struggles to identify any specific failings, eventually settling on the damning assessment of “everything”.
Blair McDougall’s campaign has been a passionate one, with a focus on how much East Ren has to lose (O’Donnell says the MP is able to be more outspoken than councillors as they are still hoping to “work constructively with the other parties”).
“East Renfrewshire has some of the best schools and brightest pupils in the country, and our local services are an immense source of local pride,” he said in September. “Glasgow city council is currently facing significant challenges with mismanagement and pulling East Renfrewshire into that mix is a risk we simply cannot afford”.
He’s been targeting parents by appearing at school gates with a “Save East Ren” poster, to drum-up support, ahead of in-person campaign events beginning. While McDougall happily agreed to speak to The Bell for this article, the interview never materialised.
The least hostile voice I encounter is that of a woman who moved from Glasgow to East Ren two months ago. Her little boy has just started primary school here. She doesn’t feel too strongly about the issue. “Everyone should have equal access to everything,” she says. “I’m about to get the train into Glasgow city centre. It’s 15 minutes away, it’s hardly worlds apart”.
East Ren residents can’t hate Glasgow too much; proximity to the city is one of the area’s biggest advantages. Data shows 45% of East Renfrewshire’s population commutes to Glasgow City for work — nearly one in two people.
In fact, only 18.6% of East Renfrewshire residents work within their own local authority, according to a Centre for Cities analysis of commuting data. And despite its great primary and secondary schools, East Renfrewshire has no college or university within its boundaries, meaning young people have to travel elsewhere for further education.
Glasgow, then, is not simply the problematic neighbour that gets too drunk and starts a fight — it’s a major part of how the area functions. East Renfrewshire’s population benefit from the jobs, transport links, universities, colleges, shops and cultural attractions that proximity to Scotland’s biggest city provides.
They pay tax, however, back in East Ren, a long-time sore point with Glasgow’s new council leader, Ricky Bell. “I’m a huge advocate of Glasgow being bigger,” Bell said in September. “Many years ago the Tory government artificially created councils on the periphery of Glasgow … where there is a fairly middle-class, well-off population and where the council makes lots of money from the council tax.
“They are in a very fortunate position where you’ve got lots of revenue coming in, but they don’t have to provide the same types of services.”
(In response, East Ren Conservative councillor Andrew Morrison says that the area’s higher income residents contribute more in tax via national rates — money that is then distributed by the government across Scotland to places like Glasgow).
What next?
For all the existing outrage, there is likely more to come: the campaign is still in its early days. Many people I speak to haven’t even heard about the proposals. O’Donnell himself worries that too few residents understand “what’s happening, or what could be at stake”.
The first Save East Ren campaign event is due to take place on 20 November at Mearns Castle High School (ranked third best in Scotland, one place behind East Ren neighbour St. Ninian’s). There certainly seems to be some appetite for it. One woman I speak to tells me she’ll be attending, despite usually spending that evening catching up with friends. “In fact, they’ll be there too, I’m sure,” she adds.
It seems East Renfrewshire is beginning to rally. Whether it’s enough to save the council, however, remains to be seen. One thing’s for certain: nobody seems particularly keen on inviting Glasgow in.
Renfrewshire Council HQ and Fenwick Road and Dumbarton Town Centre West Dunbartonshire Council headquarters in Dumbarton. Top of page: Glasgow City Council has no friends in talks to reform local government.