Andrew Neil blames a “national scandal” of local government failure and incompetence, others argue the rot goes much deeper. In a two-part series for Sceptical Scot, Charlie Ellis explores a complicated landscape: “not just a story of bad councils, it’s a collision between old-school market beliefs in a modern world of hollowed-out authorities and changing global shopping habits”
The condition of Scotland’s high streets has become a subject of intense and often polarising debate.
Recently, the state of Glasgow’s Sauchiehall Street prompted a blistering critique from veteran journalist Andrew Neil, who branded it “a shambles and a disgrace to Scotland’s biggest city” and a “national scandal.” Visiting the thoroughfare for the first time in more than a decade, Neil expressed “anger and indignation” that a street which “used to be world-famous, Glasgow’s equivalent of Oxford Street” had become a “ghost of its former self.” Similar anxieties have long been voiced about many city streets across Scotland, including Edinburgh’s Princes Street. Once celebrated as one of Europe’s finest promenades, it’s been seen as having fallen on hard times, a poor shadow of its former self.
Why have Scotland’s high streets declined? Whilst Andrew Neil blames a “national scandal” of local government failure and incompetence, others argue the rot goes much deeper. This isn’t just a story of bad councils; it’s a collision between old-school market beliefs and a modern world of hollowed-out authorities and changing global shopping habits. The struggle for the soul of Sauchiehall Street and Princes Street has become a battle of narratives: is our urban decline a choice made by politicians, or an unavoidable side effect of a shifting economy?
Neil’s Earlier Warnings: The Case of Edinburgh
Andrew Neil’s attack on Glasgow isn’t an isolated outburst; in common parlance, he has “previous” regarding the decline of Scotland’s urban spaces. In a 1997 Spectator piece titled “The Other Edinburgh,” he described a landscape of “urban squalor” during Festival season, characterised by rising violence, attacks on foreign students, and the spread of addiction from the margins into the “very heart of our capital.” He argued that the city’s prestige was being eroded by a “filthy, shabby disgrace,” blaming a “do-nothing city council” and a “politically correct culture” for failing to tackle public intoxication, aggressive begging, and litter.
In that essay, Neil painted a picture of a “schizophrenic experience” in which historic beauty was systematically undermined by dereliction. He described Princes Street as the “preserve of panhandlers,” with “doorways colonised by beggars and their dogs,” and suggested that even the city’s elite institutions had lost their lustre. For Neil, the culprits were a combination of poor planning, “barbarian developers,” and complacent local authorities that had allowed “crass commercial outlets” to replace the “civilised and refined” city of the past.
These interventions, and the cut-through they’ve had, illustrate the degree to which Neil has always been far more than a mere journalist, interviewer, or editor. He has always been a prominent voice taking on controversial topics with typical forthrightness. This includes his monologues when hosting This Week for the BBC, some of which ‘went viral’, such as his response to the Paris attacks of 2015. He continues that today on his Times Radio show, with introductions setting the events of the day in context and providing a narrative. Neil’s interventions on the state of Scotland’s most famous high streets are typical of the way he’s capable of succinctly and colourfully narrating developments in a tangible way.
For such narratives to gain traction, they must be articulated repeatedly across different eras. Writing under his “Piloti” pseudonym in Private Eye in 2014, the late architectural historian Gavin Stamp offered a scathing indictment of the “incompetence and worse” characterising Edinburgh’s local government. Stamp’s critique provided a neat echo of Neil’s earlier warnings, though his focus was more on the ‘built environment’. He argued that the capital was in a “mess” primarily because of the City Council’s encouragement of new architecture that was so “culpably mediocre and insensitive” as to provoke public protest. He specifically targeted the Caltongate development, describing it as a “stale, sterile modernist confection of concrete” promoted by offshore investors. For Stamp, the council’s planning department had become “supine,” ignoring the concerns of nearly every responsible amenity body to facilitate developments that lacked any meaningful connection to the historic urban fabric.
Nostalgia, Politics, and Competing Narratives
Underlying these critiques is a pervasive mood of nostalgia for a more ordered urban life, whether the “civilised and refined” Edinburgh of memory or the Glasgow that enjoyed a “30-year renaissance.” Neil’s comments tap into a broader narrative about the decline of British cities, yet that narrative takes different forms across the political spectrum. On the radical right, commentators such as Matthew Goodwin frame urban decay as the result of political mismanagement and demographic change, arguing that cities like London have been transformed into “gritty, dirty, crime-infested” places that are losing a recognisable national identity. Nigel Farage has made similar claims about Glasgow, attributing change to immigration and cultural displacement. Through immigration, Glasgow is being ‘turned into a completely different city in every way’, a ‘cultural smashing of Glasgow.’
Neil builds on his longstanding critique of Scotland as a country in decline due to what he considers a statist, risk-averse, and “unambitious” culture. For Neil, the “shambles” on the high street is
Neil’s critique, however, remains distinctively focused on political economy. Whilst he’s occasionally echoed culture-war themes, his recent focus on Glasgow centres on governance and the failure of local authorities rather than on immigration or identity. In this, he builds on his longstanding critique of Scotland as a country in decline due to what he considers a statist, risk-averse, and “unambitious” culture. For Neil, the “shambles” on the high street is mirrored by a similar decline in the classroom. He’s frequently used his own alma mater, Paisley Grammar, as a symbol of Scotland’s fading social mobility.
In the late 1980s, Neil viewed the school as a vital “academic hothouse” for bright, working-class children, even using his platform as editor of The Sunday Times to lobby Margaret Thatcher directly to save it from closure. Returning to the school in later years for his 2011 documentary, Posh and Posher, Neil lamented its transformation into what he termed a “bog-standard comprehensive.” He argued that the abolition of the selective grammar system had replaced “intellectual rigour” with a “poverty of ambition,” citing the presence of a police station on school grounds as a visceral sign of social regression. In Neil’s worldview, the decay of the Scottish high street and the “shameful” slide of its schools are two sides of the same coin: a country being hollowed out by incompetent local governance and a political culture that has abandoned the pursuit of excellence. In short, that decline is the product of incompetence and lack of ambition within local and national governance.
The Market Populist Paradox
A striking feature of Neil’s position is what might appear to be a paradox: a longstanding champion of the free market lamenting the rise of “crass commercial” streetscapes. Central to the market populist perspective is that criticising the effects of the free market is elitist, as the market is considered a true expression of democracy in action. Similarly, Stamp’s critique of the Caltongate proposals as architecture promoted by “offshore investors” could be read as a desire to limit the influence of finance capital on urban development. In Stamp’s case, his reputation as a “young fogey” makes this stance less surprising; however, in Neil’s case, the ideological contradictions seem significantly stronger.
The tension dissolves when one recognises Neil’s distinction between an organic market and what he perceives as state-managed commercialism. His solution isn’t to curb commerce but to remove what he regards as an obstructive and incompetent local authority, hence his radical call for the council to be “put into administration.” For Neil, loosening the grip of council control would allow “true” market forces to drive the regeneration he believes the city needs, suggesting that the current “mess” is a failure of local government intervention rather than a failure of the market.
This stance aligns closely with Neil’s earlier writings. In his Manifesto for a Modern Meritocrat, he cast market economics as a transformative engine of social mobility. During his editorship of The Sunday Times, he championed the disruptive potential of market-driven change to unsettle Britain’s entrenched class hierarchies. A 1984 speech (later published as The 1980s: a Conservative Decade? by the CPC) developed this argument further. There, Neil insisted that the 1980s should be understood as a “radical decade,” comparable in scale and ambition to the Industrial Revolution. He urged those holding the “radical Tory position” to accept the emergence of a more “varied society,” one in which cultural and social norms would no longer be set from the centre. The real challenge for conservatives, he argued, would be whether their commitment to “freedom and individual enterprise” could withstand “the freedom to do what Tories do not like.”
Decades later, the urban decline of places like Sauchiehall Street arguably represents the ultimate test of this “radical” position. If the market chooses the convenience of the digital algorithm or the suburban retail park over the historic city centre, the resulting dereliction is simply the price of that same individual enterprise Neil once championed.
In Part Two tomorrow, Charlie Ellis probes deeper structural forces behind the decline
Leave a Reply