Others asked who the heck would wish to live in the streets around such a ghetto.Then came the counter-protest. Mr McCarron denounced his critics as middle-class do-gooders who had no idea what it was like to live with such neighbours: “It’s time we acted on behalf of all the decent council tenants of Glasgow. Now it has been reduced to uninhabitable desolation by a small minority of fire-raising, vandalising tenants.Mr McCarron declared that enough was enough. He is a human being who ruins the lives of other human beings.

He and often his family – the women and children he leaves behind him when he finally kicks his way out of the universe – are the phenomenon we call “anti-social tenants” or “neighbours from hell”.A great row is going on in Glasgow about Councillor Jim McCarron, the city’s housing convener. He lost whatever cool he may have possessed when the decision was taken to bulldoze 200 houses in South Balornock, a district which was renovated only 10 years ago at a cost of pounds 2.7m.The housing scheme was provided with play-parks and flower-beds and nice paved patios, and even won an urban regeneration award. Returning a few months later, one might find a gruesome change in the patient’s appearance: rubbish and graffiti, the smell of urine, and – worst of all – more bruised doors as “respectable” tenants fled the stair and were replaced by families thrust in by the council as emergency cases.If the area was vulnerable to infection because of unemployment and general abandonment, as many of the big peri-urban housing schemes were, the plague would multiply until block after block had its ground-floor windows nailed over with hardboard and the kerbs and grass verges were scattered with dismembered cars.It’s easy to take refuge behind a figure of speech, and describe this disaster by a medical metaphor But the guy with the boot is not a virus. The close (entry passage) might be clean, the common stair swept, most of the apartment doors in good order. But sometimes there would be one door with a bruised look – painted-over cracks in the panels, an unevenness where a lock had been replaced.Here dwelt somebody who got into his home with a boot rather than a key.If the repairs were fresh, the disease was usually about to spread. But sometimes they lead to the collapse of a whole community, the flight of families, police patrolling in Land Rovers with grilles over the windows.

As the Germans say, Wehret den Anfangen: beware of the first signs.
For me, in the days when I used to go electioneering in the West of Scotland, the symptom was a door. But we learn to recognise them: the moment of dryness in the throat that prefigures a cold, the crawling sensation down the skin which means ‘flu

The sickness of a housing estate is not so different There, too, the warning symptoms are minute but clear Sometimes they don’t develop further. The First symptoms of illness are tiny. Might he not model children’s clothes? I particularly liked those words of his you quoted “God Bless Us Every One!” and have passed them on to the Labour Party’s Media Department to see if they might conceivably be of use in our campaign to make it clear to the people of Britain just how much we care and just how cheerful we are determined to be. If we were to do so of course we would approach Tim or his agent through proper channels Ebenezer might well come and see you personally. I must say, judging from the photograph you have sent of him, he is the sort of child with whom no self-respecting politician would refuse to be photographed!I’ll deal in my next letter with our proposals for Non-Lone Unworking Mothers – I am sure you want to get Mrs Cratchit out of the house and earning as much as we do! Thanks again for your letter and God Bless Us Everyone!Tonyq Wallace Arnold is away. I also have grave doubts of allowing him free use of the hat Our aim is to get him back into the community and working.