We all know things aren’t going well for councils in Scotland and that they’re about to get worse with the bin strikes, but the question is how did we get here? Having just had a couple of interesting close-up experiences of councils, I’d like to make a few suggestions.

My first experience was the meeting in Glasgow this week of the Merchant City and Trongate Community Council at which people who live in the area raised the issues bothering them and representatives from the city council and the police explained what they were trying to do about it. Anyone who lives in the centre of Glasgow will know what came up: crime, litter, graffiti, drugs, homelessness.

A couple of things stood out. The first was the admission from the city council that they’ve effectively given up on the graffiti. The council representative said they used to send teams down to the Clyde to remove it from the walls there, but that they’ve now simply re-designated part of the riverside as a “graffiti art zone” and stopped cleaning it up. The council rep also admitted why they’ve done this: it’s not an artistic decision, they just don’t have the resources to keep up.

The other thing that stood out was the drug problem in the centre of the city. We know the council’s been doing some good stuff on........

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