Nightmare estate where Conservative leader saw the light

"It was a grey, wet day and we stopped in a sheltered walkway where heroin addicts inject the drug into their bodies. In a stairwell I saw a place where a child had been playing. A discarded teddy bear lay in the corner. A perfectly ordinary sight. Except that next to it lay the paraphernalia of a crack cocaine addict. What hope does that child have?"

With those words the Tory leader, Iain Duncan Smith, tried yesterday to explain how a visit to one of Europe's most deprived housing estates heralded the Conservative Party's own road to Damascus.

However, as conversions go the epiphany of Mr Duncan Smith was one which the people of Easterhouse in Glasgow have heard all too often before. Just seven miles to the east of the city centre but a world away from the image of Glasgow as a former European capital of culture, Easterhouse, which comprises 15 separate neighbourhoods stretching from Cranhill in the west to Barlanark in the south, is home to more than 31,000 people.

It was incorporated by Glasgow Corporation in 1938 from Lanarkshire for the sole purpose of housing overspill from the city and rehousing slum dwellers from the Gorbals.

It was in an attempt to erase the negative image that the name "Gorbals" gave Glasgow as a whole that city planners used the post-war redevelopment period as an opportunity to bulldoze and rebuild whole communities. Huge swaths of sub-standard and overcrowded back-to-back housing were condemned and destroyed. However, while construction of the estate, which is made up of predominantly three and four apartment properties, began in 1954, poor planning meant that no provision was made for shops or amenities.

Without the basic structures to identify and maintain a sustainable community, the residential dream of Easterhouse as a solution to Glasgow's housing problem became a nightmare of social exclusion and poverty as thousands of families were relocated from run-down communities to soulless tower blocks.

Around 77 per cent of tenants living in Easterhouse are on housing benefit, the majority of adults are classed as long-term unemployed, infant mortality is 4.5 times the national average and the estate has the lowest educational achievement in Scotland.

The success of awareness programmes has helped to curb a spiralling drug culture but for many Easterhouse is still a community which has felt neglected for far too long to have anything other than a cynical reaction to Mr Duncan Smith's newfound concern.

"What the Conservatives are saying is just a PR stunt," said one disgruntled resident yesterday. "I don't think they have a clue really about what's going on in places like this."

Margaret Curran, who represents Easterhouse in the Scottish Parliament, yesterday went as far as to accuse the Tory leader of using "crocodile tears" to reposition his party.