Glasgow should learn lessons from Manchester which is “booming”, Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar has said.

Sarwar, speaking during a visit to the city’s Barrowland Ballroom with Lucy Powell, Manchester Central MP and shadow culture secretary this week, said it feels like Glasgow is trying to attract investment with “one hand tied behind our back” due to the SNP.

And he said the city’s streets were “distressed”, and branded the roll-out of the city’s Low Emission Zone “disastrous”, adding that hospitality venues are “having to close down because they’re not getting supported by either local authority or the Scottish Government”.  Concerns over the state of the city centre, including filthy streets and empty shops, have been voiced in recent weeks.

Glasgow Times:

Labour has launched a ‘recovery’ commission to get expert views on how to reinvigorate Glasgow, while the SNP has said a city centre taskforce is already in place.

An SNP spokesman said Sarwar’s “regular denigration of Glasgow” is “tiresome and predictable” and the city continues to attract events and investment, such as COP26 and the World Cycling Championships.

Sarwar believes that Manchester — where Labour’s Andy Burnham is the elected mayor of Greater Manchester — is a “real model that I think Glasgow can follow”.  He said the SNP council has “no interest in growing our city centre” and the “distracted, out of touch” SNP government at Holyrood has “no idea about how to attract talent and has no plan for growth”.

The Labour leader said Glasgow can learn “the lessons from what Manchester has done really successfully”. “That supports our hospitality sector, that supports great local talent, that delivers economic growth and delivers jobs and opportunities for the city.”

“You can see how distressed our high streets are,” he added. “Retail brands are now leaving the city centre of Glasgow because they don’t feel it’s getting the investment it needs.  “How tired Glasgow Airport is because it doesn’t get the strategic support needed. We are very clear, we want to stop trying to sell Scotland to the Scots, we want to sell Scotland to the rest of the UK and we want to sell Scotland to the world.”

Sarwar pledged Labour would strengthen local transport infrastructure and “reinvigorate our high streets through reforming our rates system, so we can get Glasgow booming again”.

He claimed Scotland’s councils are in “managed decline” and are “focused on how they survive rather than how they thrive or how they grow”.  “We’ve got to change that, so that means a fairer funding settlement for local government,” he said. “Secondly, it’s making sure we have proper economic growth plans that partner local authorities.”

The SNP has argued city centre evening and weekend footfall is above pre-pandemic levels, and billions of pounds of private sector investment is in the pipeline.  Responding to Sarwar’s comments, the spokesman said the “single biggest issue this city faces is cleaning up his party’s legacy of pay discrimination which he conveniently neglects”.

“Not content with taking money out of the pockets of Glaswegian workers, UK Labour are committing to Tory policies on a daily basis, from punishing the poorest to forcing asylum seekers onto floating prisons,” he added.

“Meanwhile Glasgow continues to attract global events and investment, from COP26 to the World Cycling Championships. Like every city coping with the fallout of the pandemic, cost-of-living crisis and changes to retail habits, we have our challenges.  “But we’re addressing those challenges with actions, not fraudulent claims and Tory policies.”