It was my first experience in any protest or direct action or anything so I’m coming fae a background of no political experience or protest experience whatsoever, with two small children. I grew up in Pollok and I was travelling up to Pollok to visit my Mother and you know how you go through Pollok in a double decker bus, you don’t expect to see a guy in a hammock up a tree. And I did see a guy in a hammock up a tree. I had no clue why that was the case but I thought it was interesting. So I went to my Mother and I asked her why there was a guy in a hammock up a tree in Pollok Park and she said: “Oh, there’s something about a motorway and there’s something about a protest.” Now my Mother at that point had lived there for about 30 years so bear that in mind, because what happened next was the next time I went up the guy was still in the hammock up a tree so my curiosity now has turned into nosiness. But I was quite shy. People find it hard to believe but I was honestly quite shy and I was just kinda bringing up these kids and getting on with it, you know? And I thought: “I need to see why this guy’s up the tree so I’ll wander through the park with the kids,” cos kids are a great excuse for things like that. So I wandered through the park with the kids and there wasnae only a guy up a tree. There was a fire, there was benches around the fire, there was some tents and benders, as I came to know the term later, and there was some very interesting people. There was a clear defined circle and there was Colin up the tree. What I did was went with my kids and it was like suddenly it wasnae a park, it was a house, and I went actually up to a tree and knocked on the tree! Really weird! And I went: “Hello? Hello?” And so they invited me in. They were nice, they never laughed at me. And it was people fae Canada, people fae Denmark, people fae all parts of England and Colin on that day was the only Glaswegian, I came to know that. But initially there was all these people from all over the world, I suppose, and that was the first thing that struck me. The next thing was that they were all dreadlocked and unusual. This was Pollok! I grew up there. A very working class community, a very poor community, and these were very colourful and different kind of hippy dudes, you know? So I got into conversation. Or I listened, rather. I was given a cup of coffee that was made on the fire and I was made to feel very, very welcome. That was my first impression: I’m welcome! My second impression was that I was being taken quite seriously as a punter having wandered in. They were interested in that a punter could wander in and my children were, by this time, already starting to dig muck and climb trees.

So I sat there for hours and my overwhelming feeling was that there was something special going on but there was something very worrying going on as well. They were talking about the environment and they were talking about the road. They were telling me about the road. Now here’s my Mother has lived there for 30 years. I grew up and lived there for 24 years, no clue. Had no clue about this and just this resounding voice in my head going: “Why doesn’t your Mother know?” Because we played in them woods. That was our woods, Pollok’s woods: “Why doesn’t my Mother know?” So my first feeling on that very day was, what I later came to know, was democracy. But that was my first feeling and I went back the next day with the kids, back to the park, and I continued going back and, you know, that was my experience. And as I went back, I learned about the roads, I learned about the implications of the road although I knew in my heart it was wrong, I learned to read maps, I learned to build fires and I learned to take direct action and I learned a lot about me and I learned I had a big voice and a lot of courage. That’s what I learned and you cannot buy that. So that was how it began for me and then I was just like stuck on it after that. It was wrong and it was right to be there to fight against it.

Tell us a bit about Pollok itself because there’s going to be people watching the film who know nothing about Pollok or Corkerhill or any of those areas. A bit of background about all that.

Right. I grew up in Pollok. Pollok, at that point ... I don’t think it still has the label but at that point was the most deprived community in Europe. It’s a big shame claim by any standard. Yeah, lots of poverty there, lots of unemployment, lots of low self-esteem, lots of young people, lots of families, very poor housing, dampness, bad health records ... So Pollok was ... It’s changed a wee bit now and some parts are still like that but, very deprived, but a good sense of community. You know, where I grew up on Leithland Road in Pollok, families were close. Everybody intermingled well. We had that kind of idyllic childhood. Although you were poor and skint, everybody was poor and skint. You played from sun up to sun down and that kind of thing but it was a big ever-increasing greater Pollok. It just kept growing and, with that, kept growing the problems of Pollok. It was busy and built up and that happened over a period of time. And then if you walked across the road and into Pollok Park which later became the Free State which later became the M77, that was where we saw trees. I don’t say that lightly, that was where we saw trees! That’s where we saw butterflies, that’s where we had picnics and we ran and rambled and hid and things that a lot of people might take for granted so that was our refuge in a very built up, grey and quite poor community.

So the park was like a vital part of the community then?

It was. It was somewhere you sneaked away to. It was somewhere your mum let you go. I had to cross two main roads as a kid with my brothers and pals to get there. But your mum let you go. The roads weren’t as busy then as they are now, thanks to the M77. And it was like a huge excursion, you know? Quarter a mile walk fae your front door, huge excursion! And you would take your pieces and jam and things that you could muster up in working class family’s kitchen. And you could go there and you could be a kid, a mucky kid, and play. I never knew that years later I would be a mucky adult there for different reasons. We had the Bluebell Woods there. It was beautiful. For kids like us, again, growing up on concrete hell, you would go there and there was the Bluebell Woods which, you know, were just like something out of a fairy story. It was the trees and the sun splitting through the trees and masses of bluebells. If you walked in as a wee Glasgow kiddy and saw that, that looked like every story book you’d ever read at school. You know, you were going into some kind of amazing grove, something that you’d seen in books, and you felt like a fairy princess. You felt like, you know, a kinda kid that grew up in that area. You thought maybe you did have a pony somewhere or ... You know, so it had a real ... It was embedded in our minds as children from a very early age cos that was our wee haven!

So what did you feel like ... In that sense, what do you think about the message of the motorway itself? Like, the council coming along and doing this, what sort of message do you think that sends to the people of Pollok?

Well, that’s ... The message that sent to the people of Pollok was: “You are disempowered. We will do what we want. You have no say and don’t imagine for a minute that you do have a say! The powers that be will have their way, whoever those powers ... A conglomerate of powers will have their way and you don’t deserve your fields. You don’t deserve your Bluebell Woods and this is what you’re getting!” Aye, it’s very disempowering. And it created a lot of anger and left people quite despondent and exhausted in the community. I don’t mean as they were in there fighting. People just ... they were like that: “Can this happen? Did that happen? Why did that happen?” And they had a pile of questions and no answers and the resounding sound that came back was that there was thousands and tens of thousands of cars every day where there used to be wee birdies singing and weans playing! So that’s the message it sends out. “You don’t deserve this, you’re getting that.”

Was there any consultation or was it like ...

Consultation? Consulting? Insulting! What I know is that some time in the 60s, or something, there was a piece possibly, I believe in the Evening Times, Glasgow Herald, which is statutory. You must announce certain consultations into such projects as part of a great concrete network of it’s time. So there was something blasted into the paper. My parents would never have had a Glasgow Herald and they wouldnae have been able to afford an Evening Times at that point. Five kiddies they were bringing up, they certainly wouldnae have had the time to sit down and ponder planning. So that would’ve been an introduction and an invitation to any consultation that was available at the time, wholly inadequate for the size and scale of what was to be visited on Pollok, several decades later in fact! So that was the only consultation, originally, that came to be. Later on, you know, there was ... We forced all sorts of other enquiries, investigations and things through protest but it never involved the community, it never does. What these things involve is invited business people, councillors who might be tied up to a government that’s putting this road, for instance, through anyway, so there’s no real ... There’s a big bias against the community in these situations and so the people never had their say. They never had access to the plans. If they did have access to the plans, how many of these working class people would’ve been able to negotiate the information, the scientific information, the strategy, the plans and everything else? You know, you need a team of scientists to get through it anyhow! Consultation? Nah. Never.

Who do you think the road was built for?

The road was built for everything fae Wimpy Homes to the oil industry, to the car manufacturers to marketing to capitalism ... Everything that I detest and learned about there. It certainly wasnae built for the better of any of the people ... There might be people who’re getting in their cars now and finding that they get up to Newton Mearns quicker than they would if they got the bus, but to imagine that’s good for them is foolish beyond belief because it’s affecting them personally, it’s affecting the environment, it’s affecting the community and it’s depleting public transport as well which, again, has that knock on effect all over again. So this was clearly never for the people. It was sold as for the people but the benefactors have been people like Wimpy who made a land grab. Tar McAdam, I don’t know. Maybe Henry Boot was involved at the time as well? Construction companies. Multinationals that got involved in it. The government’s drive to pollute the planet and to keep in with their big business buddies! They all have benefitted fae that, financially, but then the folk that have benefitted don’t have to live with the outcome. They’ve got the luxury probably of living somewhere near a wooded grove with bluebells in it, like what we used to have.

What do you think of ... I’m going to come on to the Free State in a minute, but that investment that went into the motorway, what could it have been used for in terms of what Pollok needed?

What Pollok needed? Pollok’s quite far away fae ... You know, it’s a wee bit of a satellite in terms of it’s communications with the rest of Glasgow. If you’re trying to get people ... If you’re trying to improve the economy, if you’re trying to have social inclusion and all of the rest of it, then you definitely need to improve the transport infrastructure. You know, there was very limited transport out of Pollok and into anywhere else. There was territorial issues as well around that so if you were taking that money as a whole and saying: “Right, we’re gonnae do something for Pollok with that,” you would maybe throw up some schools and reduce the class sizes, you know? Encourage children and better education, that would be one thing you could do. You could improve the local health instead of causing deterioration in the local health with pollution, with awareness and recycling and things like that. You could certainly invest in public transport in and out of Pollok if this was a transport matter that we were trying to deal with. The fact of the matter is, car ownership in that area is relatively low and therefore this road was never feeding the needs of that community and to feed those needs, it was about communication with other communities! You could assist the young people in Pollok, there’s a huge amount of young people, because when the schemes were built, families moved in and have subsequently had three, four, five children each with very little amenities there. There’s an array you could’ve done and continued to have done that would’ve improved Pollok and beyond and Glasgow and Scotland and the planet, instead of throwing it at a huge concrete white elephant that just scowls and spits at Pollok. So yeah, endless list.

Okay ... So back to the Free State and kind of ... What was it like when ...? How did you start to get involved, yourself? What sort of things did you do?

Listened to people, watched ... I was fascinated by what was going on there and I was thinking things that I would like to say cos I was thinking: “Well, I’m fae Pollok and I want the people fae Pollok to know what I know. They need to know what I know!” And that was quite important to me so when we started having workshops, the camp wasnae only about screaming about security guards and concrete mixers. The camp was a huge educational experience that maybe people don’t realise that. So you would learn ... We’d have discussions about democracy. We’d have discussions about the decision making process, about politicians, about who was responsible, about the environment, about the ozone and all of that. And just sitting around all those discussions and eventually with your heart pounding and your lip quivering and your face scarlet, you would eventually maybe stick your hand up like you were at school and utter something! And it was lovely because you would say something like: “Well, I’m fae Pollok. I grew up here ... “ and I would tell my story about these woods and what they meant to us and I would say: “And my Mum never knew about this.” And it was quite a simple request - “People like my Mum should know about this.” And you got such an incredibly warm response. Somebody was saying: “Yeah, you’re right!” and here I was in the hugely scientific, complex discussion and saying something like that. That’s really encouraging and so the next day you dared to contribute a wee bit more so at first it was about growth and development. Everybody was experiencing that, that wasnae my thing. Everybody was growing and developing. And then I suppose that went on and on. We trained in direct action, non-violent, safe, keeping ourselves safe, direct action. So you learned to climb trees effectively. You learned to use lock-ons. So as that’s going on, you start to become a bit of a professional. You know how the gadgets work, you know what you need to do to them. None of this is left to chance! So that encourages you and makes you brave and that backs up your initial feelings of: “This needs to be fought.”

So now you’ve got the tools, you need to fight it. And I suppose the turning point for me ... There’s lots of occasions where lots of security come in and eventually we’d chase them. Lots of police would come in and eventually we’d chase them. And I used to kind of run around the periphery of that, just run around blowing whistles and running around! But one day, a real anger ... I was on Barrhead Road. They were shutting us down this day. We did chase them at the end of that day but they definitely ... It was getting full on. It was getting serious. Security, police ... The usual. And that kind of feeling that you’re imprisoned. You cannae move backward, forward, right or left, you’re really hemmed in. And I actually physically remember the feeling of something coming fae my toes right up through my body and it was a primal scream! Honestly, I’m standing on Barrhead Road, a road that I’ve ran up and down and known all of my life, and I cannae move cos guys in uniforms are saying: “We wanna destroy your park!” And that culminated in some kind of strange reaction. I was allergic to them! (laughs) And just ... So I screamed! Nothing, no words, but it was a really deep, loud scream and I remember going: “Where the hell did that come fae?” It was me! It came fae me! And I never shut up after that. I literally found my voice. And I though the next day: “I’m going to try and shout that loud again!” Sounds really ... Sounds silly now, but it was a really important part of my voice because I didnae have it before and then the next day, not only did I have the ability to lock on, not only did I have the health and strength to run and the bottle to stand up against it, I now had a voice and I was confident with that voice and there was just no turning back, for me personally, at that point. And it was an excellent moment for me. It was from despair, from the loss of something dear, but when do you get angry? If you don’t get angry then, when do you get angry? So I got angry and that, for me, was the turning point cos then I just felt like really part of something, quite courageous and very, very determined and I had all the different tools I need now. The set was complete. A lot of people who went, they were already like that but that wasnae my experience. I went in a very shy mother of two who would never have spoke up or complained about anything to somebody who’d go up a tree and scream at the top of her voice. That’s a big change in a person over six months.

How many other people from Pollok got involved? Cos you weren’t the only one were you?

Well, that was the unique thing about this motorway protest. I think ... I had seen on TV things like Twyford Down. I had seen all sorts of ... You know, on the news previous to my own activity and certainly, it’s no true, but it seems sometimes that motorway protesting and environmental matters are the reserve of perhaps the middle class or a highly educated group of people or quite colourful individuals or a collection of all of that and sometimes you can feel excluded from something like that, even if you feel quite passionately about it. So I’d seen that and I couldnae really associate with some of the people, perhaps, that I was hearing and seeing. Maybe that’s prejudice in my upbringing but in Pollok that was the difference. If you looked to Pollok Free State and you listened to Colin, to Lindsay Keenan, to myself and to many, many others, you’ll hear working class accents. You’ll hear people who have never done anything like this before who are really in there. It’s quite unusual. It’s kinda changed a wee bit but we’re going back quite a lot of years, over a decade now, and at that time the environment was not something people were aware of in the working class community. Oh my God, they got aware of it! We then reached out to the community. We would go and speak. You know, we kind of took on the role of almost Jehovah Witness type people! We were evangelical. We’d go round the doors and we would talk directly to people cos we felt that people needed to get involved and they needed to understand what was happening. Houses built right next to the motorway, for instance, and beyond and ... So more and more and more and more, it was wonderful, you started to hear that local accent. The children fae the school, various people, people you’d gone to school with yourself, your neighbours, in this weird situation of sitting round a campfire with kinda carvings everywhere and quite odd things that we werenae used to and we quickly became another community within the community. So there was ... It was unusual at the time for working class people ... Well, working class people have risen up for years in Glasgow. You know, the shipyards and the strikers and everything else. But on the environment? Able to articulate that whole ozone, pollution, trees ... And, you know, everybody pulled their O Level Science out their pockets and it was quite remarkable. When the police came en masse, I was going into college at Langside. I was ... takes you onto other things. I plucked up the courage to go and get an education so I went to college, Social Sciences, and I continued to ... and Geography I studied, the physical landscape of the ... And Politics, I wrote about the decision making process in relation to the M77 and History, I looked at the history of Pollok Park. What a chancer! So I did the whole of my access to uni course and that allowed me to go and sit in the camp and study! Aye right! So I was doing that and I was going in to college this day and Langside, quite near Aitkenhead police station which was a big base at the time. About six miles away from Pollok Free State. A police car comes. Another police car comes. A police car, another, another, another ... motorcycles, vans ... I’d never seen anything like it in my life but I knew exactly what it meant. We never had mobile phones or anything so I ran into the college and my Geography lesson and shouted: “The Police are attacking the M77! I think they’re attacking the camp! Will anybody come with me?” And it was really one of those moments where four women stood up and went: “I’ll go with you!” They’d no feckin idea what I was up to and neither had I. “I’ll go with you!” And we got in a woman’s car and tried to get there before the police got there so they’d shut off Barrhead Road but, growing up in Pollok, I knew another way into the park and these poor unsuspecting classmates of mine ... We waded through and we ran and ran and it was dead hard and we could ... If you’d seen it from the sky I suppose we were coming in, five people, fae one direction and there was hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of police coming in fae another direction. But we were faster and we got into the camp but there was just a handful of women there, Gehan and others, and I was screaming incoherently: “They’re coming, they’re coming!” And they did and they lined up against us and there was just a wall of ... It was probably one of the most painful days ... It’s vivid, so vivid. I can smell it. I can see it, a highly emotional snapshot in my life and they just lined up everywhere and we just looked at each other and went ... you know? The wind’s blowing ... I can still feel it, the wind’s blowing in your hair and ... just feel it. We were utterly on our own and unable to communicate with anybody, it was ... It’s funny to imagine that nobody had mobile phones but very few of us did and ... Well, we just shouted and we screamed and we tried and they pushed us back and we tried to burst through security and we tried to burst through police and we imagined we could stop the cutters and then, one by one, you hear that noise, the buzz, the drone, and then the creaking of the tree. Down she goes and then the next one, down she goes, and ... two years in that park and others had been there more than two years ... You know these trees, you’ve been up these trees. They mean so much to you anyway and you hear them breaking like matches and a space appearing where a space had never been before. It’s very, very vivid and it was extremely painful, personally and as a group and for the community. There was so many levels of agony about it. It sounds very dramatic but, you know, if you see a huge gap like that appearing in a forest, it is hugely painful to see, especially for that purpose.

So we went up and down this line and we begged and we pleaded. It was all we could do, you know? And ... I don’t know. It was the saddest and most ... We were so battered. We were so battered and powerless and exhausted. Then we sat and we cried and we picked ourselves back up again and I remember Gehan and myself in particular going up and down the line, like the woman you showed me, the woman in your film who is appealing emotionally fae the heart. We were doing that and we meant it. And I remember saying, and Gehan as well, we were saying: “I’m your sister. I’m like your mother, like your daughter. I’m like your neighbour.” Cos we could see these were working class lads from the security company and we meant it and we knew that if one of them stepped aside we still couldnae get through and save our park, we knew that. But by this time we were just like: “You’re wrong! You need to think about what you’re doing!” And we’d moved on to another level. So, you know: “I’m your sister, I’m your mother, please don’t do this to us. Please don’t stand against us.” So we knew we still couldnae get through but we were hurt by these lads standing against us like that. We werenae rude, we werenae aggressive. We were appealing and sad. And then it was one of they moments that brightened up, oddly, a dreadful dreadful day. A guy said: “I cannae take any mair of this,” and we thought he was gonnae insult us and he pulled his hat off and just threw it on the ground. You know when you just wished you’d filmed it? And then he took off his light green jacket and he said: “Any chance of a cup of tea?” And, you know, you’re just going: “Fucking celebrate humanity!” at that point, that this man was so decent. And that caused a domino effect. Other guys did the same thing and they walked away and, you know, we couldnae fight that line. It was too much, it was too many, and we sat at the camp with these guys and we turned our backs on them and we heard the trees collapsing and we kinda ... with any highly emotional thing, phased it out a wee bit for a while and then people fae Pollok had seen it on the news, Barrhead Road was closed. People were annoyed about that, “How dare they?” you know? Massive road closed by police and people from Pollok came to the end of the road. They knew that the protestors who they’d come to know and love over a big long period of time ... They delivered food to us. They delivered anything they could. They kept us company. They allowed us to use their showers if we were getting a bit manky and things like that so the public came to that line and ...

Could you imagine? We’re in the park, maybe up a tree or wherever, and you look and you can see the line of police but behind them you can see these faces of your neighbours and folk you know and Pollok in all it’s glory standing there shouting ... you know, shouting the odds, trying to get tae us cos they feel we’re vulnerable and they feel that they’re losing their park and ... Oh my God, it was so charged! And I went up a tree to see better and to hopefully protect the tree. Went up a tree which is always a good thing to do when you’re in despair and I could see this go on and then somebody, a cop, came running up to me and he said: “Are you Rosie?” And I said “Aye.” I thought he was gonnae caution me. And he says: “I’ve got something for you here.” And we had ropes and they passed me up a bag and I open it and it’s a plastic bag and I opened the plastic bag and it was a Liverpool scarf, right? And it said: “You’ll never walk alone,” and apples and bananas and juice and biscuits and it was fae ma Mother and she was away at the other side of that line and she managed to, through some process including collaboration with a polis, get me food and ... Can you imagine, you know, how desperate and painful this whole thing was? How much we’d fought, how much the land meant to us, how much the environment meant to everybody and the huge engagement and community that had occurred over two years ... Bang! Literally getting cut in half with a chainsaw and then out of that comes these bloody wee kernels of beauty, you know? These people and their courage and their strength when the chips were down! So they built a road, they did build a road, but my God, they created a hell of a group of people. They built resistance against attacks on the environment and they built resistance against the lack of democracy that has never gone away. So the road’s there but, like that, so much came from it. People who went on fae there fought other roads, fought against nuclear weapons, fought against any number of things because once your skull’s been cracked open at that level, there’s no putting it away again. It’s a huge event in Glasgow, Scotland’s history.

A lot of the security guys were local guys, weren’t they, what was that like, that relationship?

Some of them were known to a lot of us. Aye, they were local to Pollok. They were local ... I came fae Govanhill, to me as well. And we were always in our training non-violent and courteous, you know? That broke a few times cos of the rage and pain that was around the issue. But yeah, they lads were there, and lassies, on crap wages wi terrible conditions and being absolutely used and abused against their own community. I mean, that was a brutal tactic to use on the part of Wimpy and the security companies that were doling this out. Aye, that were local lassies and boys that were known to many of us, who stood in the ranks against us. You know, it was terrible for them. We had an understanding that we were smart. We knew what we were doing and what we were thinking and what we were talking about and so, therefore, we knew that these people were being used and abused in the whole game. They were part of a game! They were being set against their neighbours, you know? It’s the kind of thing that happens in war. It’s the kind of abuse that happens to people in civil war and where people are used against each other. They’re used to tell on each other and stuff like that and so these folks fae Pollok that were put on the front line ... Well, I tell you what. Their employers put them at risk. It was the case that the protestors in the camp were peaceful, non-violent, and would never have pursued any kind of assault or anything off camp against these individuals but, potentially, that could’ve happened. That was only thanks to our discipline and training that these folk werenae at risk. Employers stood them directly against people who grew up in their own community to tell them: “You cannot move forward. We are chopping down your trees and we are actually standing in front of the police today.” So the police were behind these poor low-paid workers! Luckily, I think that we had the discipline and the dignity to be disgruntled about that, to appeal to these guys and lassies no to do this but I think it was extremely cynical and quite dangerous of Wimpy and others to put they folk on the front line and I’m certain that many of them said ... What they did was they advertised for security guards. People went thinking they would be working at Debenhams front door and they ended up at the peace camp against their neighbours and they were in a job ... And we would say to them: “What you doing standing there against me? I went to school with you! What you doing standing against me? You know my Mother!” So you would have these conversations and they would be like heads down and: “Look, I’m only getting two eighty five an hour. It’s coming up to Christmas,” which it was: “It’s coming up to Christmas. I’ve got a wife and a kid and ... “ You know, you were standing there ... You would get self-righteous and, you know: “I’d rather starve and have no Christmas than do what you’re doing!” You know, you would say things like that but, ultimately, I felt sorry for them and I put it out of my mind that they were neighbours, friends and old schoolmates because if I didn’t put it out of my mind then it would’ve added insult to injury, so it was important just to see them as part of a green wall of jackets rather than say: “Right, you’re an individual. I know you. You grew up in my community,” cos it’s no helping anybody. I don’t see any point in a verbal onslaught against an individual who’s taken a job that they’d rather no take and who’s been cynically used, almost as a weapon, against the protestors. And so you don’t rise to that bait. You’re dignified and you rise above it, that was my feeling about that because I couldnae get intae it with them. I just couldnae.

You’ve spoken a bit about this fact, like environmentalism was kind of seen as a kind of middle class thing then. There was also this ... at least the way it comes over, is also this kind of tree protest. It’s quite kind of macho, it’s a very masculine form of protesting.

Yeah. (laughs)

What was your kind of experience? What was the dynamic between women and men in the ... ?

Yeah, it was. You’re absolutely right in pointing that out and certainly there was ... I did, jokingly and half seriously, call some of the men cavemen and I didnae mean because they had long, straggly hair and an axe in their hand. There was ... You know, there was definitely that whole ... There was a lot of misogyny. There always is in these things, you know? There was a lot of kinda going out and killing the dinosaur and bringing it back to cook on the fire while us women would’ve painted nice slogans and things like that. There was a wee element of that around but it wasnae hard to nip that in the bud, to put that wee gas outta peep, and that was something else I learned very quickly. So, yeah ... And sometimes it did take physical strength. There was no stronger man than Colin Macleod, you know? It took great physical strength to do some of the things that needed to be done and it was a bit caveman-esque at times but, you know, these women, and myself latterly, were extremely feisty, very bolshy, and the men learned ... I saw the men learning in that process that we had the courage, the strength and the ability that perhaps they werenae really aware of before so I think that ... I don’t know if they would ever admit that initially it was very macho and guy led. Things are. Society is like that, workplaces are like that. But here were quite extraordinary women who were more than willing to get underneath a JCB and dismantle it and stay there. Here were women that could get up a tree, you know, as nimble a gazelle! Here were women who could take it on and everything else so maybe these guys learned for the first time. Maybe that was their first experience, I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt. But yeah, there was but we eliminated that. These were women of huge courage and huge conviction and we ended up working very well together, and we raised these issues when they occurred and we didnae take any crap and we didnae accept sexist remarks or chauvinistic behaviour so it was challenged, as it should be, and it was rectified, as it should be. (laughs)

Kind of more generally, the camp ... Well, Colin was involved in protesting for even longer, from ’92 and stuff like that. The core camp was like two years wasn’t it?

Yes, aye.

That’s quite a long time to keep going so how did that work?

Well, it was a long time. It was the fastest two years of anyone’s life, I have to say. It was so dynamic and busy. It worked because it was a very good collective, you know? People had a good idea of this community and this collective and this sharing process. People were courteous and supportive of each other. We worked hard. We learnt well, so that was people working together. We kept busy; busy, busy, busy. We reached out ... So we did lots and lots of things that inspired people, kept people together. We also had exhaustion. We had terrible times. Yeah, you don’t build a camp easily. You don’t maintain that camp easily. We had public meetings. We never only shouted at things, we also used the decision making process. We used politics, initially. We tried every route before we started shouting. So you can imagine, that’s quite a busy thing. You’re studying, you’re minding how it goes, you’re up at Glasgow City Council ... So it’s quite an active, very active, thing that’s going on. You’re trying to recruit people into the idea and train them and everything else and you have to laugh as well. Sometimes you do ridiculous direct actions that are just really a bit like the court jester arriving. We did things that we needed to do to keep us together, you know? You’ll see in some of the footage and some of the photographs, och we’re all standing around and somebody’s got themselves chained to something and we’re kinda jovial and we look like we’re standing around. The prelude to that would’ve been intelligence that the cutters were in and we would’ve travelled by whatever means necessary, including me getting a taxi for free one time: “Hey taxi, stop! Will you take me to the thing? And I’ve no money!” And he did! And so ... You know, you did whatever you could to get there and it was an exhausting day and then we would end up mulling around this geezer that’s chained to something or something like that. So if you look at all of that, you were working 14 hour shifts. You were busy! We were sharing, we were learning, we were training ... So a real community developed. We had a home. We had passports for our Free State. You know, we had friends. There was a huge bond in that kind of context, in the direct action, in the emergency of it all. There was a huge bond between people and it was almost ... You know, breaking up the camp was a lot harder than keeping it going! We were velcroed together, hundreds if not thousands of people, with one common aim and that was to protect the park and the environment. So it was never at risk because of the nature of it, because we could laugh as well as cry, because we were interested in learning, because we were developing something quite big here and because we had the world to fight for! You cannae underestimate that so it was never ever at risk, the gelling of what went on there and how it stayed together for that many years. Of course there were the battles. Of course there was arguments. Of course there was people who just simply didnae like each other! There was loves torn apart ... There was all sorts of things! It was like a massive soap opera some days but that was dealt with and we never left anybody on their own. If something flared up, it wasn’t that thing you would do on a bus where you would just ignore it. People intervened and calmed down and sat people down and it was, you know, it was a really different type of way of dealing with life, for me. It was never going to not work really.

You mentioned earlier about people ... Like why you didn’t want to go down at night, because there was issues with people and drink and drugs. Talk a little about that and how it got resolved?

Yeah, I know ... Bearing in mind, when I went into the M77 protest, I had two small children. I was a lone parent and I was just getting back intae education, busy life. So I was down there at day time every day. And then once when I never had the kids with me, I stayed after dark and by then, on this particular night, some guy arrived that wasnae known to me, extremely drunk, swinging a bottle of Buckfast, whatever ... A whole load of stuff like that and other wee folk, attracted by the fire, attracted by the spectacle that is the M77 protest, and coming in and thinking it was ... It was a working camp, it wasnae a holiday camp, and so ... You know, I was getting a bit uncomfortable with that and kinda upset the harmony I was used to at the camp. I wasnae comfortable with that at all. There was a couple of nights where huge parties were held which was right, we deserved a huge party quite often, but again ... excitement, adrenaline, stupidity. Things would get out of hand to the point where it felt a bit risky and maybe the harmony of things could break down, maybe fights could develop and people were turning up that werenae there as part of the protests that didnae understand the ethos behind what was going on. I was very uncomfortable with that and concerned. Never went at night because of that, I’m talking a year and a half, literally, although being there every day. But, you know, it was raised and discussed eventually and I think it was as a result of a woman who had quite a serious drink problem coming along, getting in to a situation wi’ drink ... I don’t know if any other substances ... where an ambulance had to be called, she was quite ill and there was an awakening at that point that this was not a good idea, that we were trying to be taken seriously here, for a start! And it was turning into something not very sensible and in the morning I’d turn up, full of coffee, fresh as a daisy and, you know, some people were just like, “Eugh ...,” lying around with their Alka-Seltzer. No! We’ve got a park to save! It was resolved in so much as we then had as is at Faslane in the protests, you know, a ban in the drinking and bringing substances into the camp and I think that was the right thing to do. It sounds ... perhaps folk would think it was a bit party pooper, draconian behaviour but, you know, it’s a volatile situation. There’s a lot of dangerous equipment, there’s an open fire and things like that and you cannae really take risks with that and we’re to engage with people, no to create the worst possible situation in Pollok. So it was resolved and I was really ... Many of us were really heartened by that, that we were back to business as usual and you could go to the pub if you wanted a pint so it was fine, it was fine.

You mentioned about the passports because we talked about that. I saw one down at GalGael. It’s got the Declaration of Independence in it as well. Did you get a passport?

I did get a passport! My whole family had passports. The passport at the Pollok Free State was a wonderful passport. You never had to put your picture or your name in it. It was a great passport in that it announced that we now had a free state that was democratically run for the people by the people and all of the rest of it and certainly, in terms of land, everybody there wouldnae claim to be pro-independence I don’t think but many of us certainly were, are. And so that was quite important to us, that this was Scotland’s land, this was Pollok’s land. What it certainly wasn’t was Wimpy’s land so, you know, you could create that whole distinction through that discussion. Bottom of the passport there was a cut off part. I don’t know if any of it survived because we did cut it off and that was a declaration that you would use your body, mind and soul, I think it said, to prevent the construction of the M77. That was the declaration and so we cut those declarations off and very cleverly they were made into loops, like children make decorations in school, and they were made into loops that were interlinked with each other and it created a beautiful white chain of paper with the names of 5000 people, no less, 5000 people, that we chained around the whole of the Free State. It was quite big, as you can imagine, and each one of those links represented a person and, you know, the importance of the link in the chain and the weakest link and all the rest of it, so it was quite a statement. Pollok Free State was full of statements and this was one of the statements. So the passport was something that became like a fashion item! It became like a Che Guevara t-shirt or something. People were like: “Gonna get me a passport? Gonna get me a passport?” And you were like that: “I’ll see what I can do ...” (laughs) And, you know, I could get them a passport. So you’d kid on you were in the know and people started getting passports and there’s probably a lot of them out there! A lot of them and it was ... Aye, that could’ve really grown. If we’d held the cutters back for longer, that could’ve developed into something quite big. So aye, it’s ... Yeah, I loved it. I’ve lost my passport but I think I’ve got it somewhere.

Cos that in a way taps into ... Like there was the motorway and there’s the environmental issues and they’re the kind of clear ones that come across first when you look at it but there’s other issues that seem to come through and, just while you’re talking about that, just tapped into that, about landownership and then there’s people’s self-determination and the rights of the community to have a say on the land. How kind of conscious were those other kind of factors?

Emm ... The factors that were on the lips of the people of Pollok and in their minds and in mine were all about the decision making process, in terms of: “When were we asked about this?” you know? “We want a say! When were we asked? What’s our councillor up to?” That was the first reaction of the people in Pollok and the environment was not something we were au fait with or used to in Pollok. God almighty, most people werenae but certainly not in the working class scheme where your choices are, you know: “How am I gonna afford my next loaf?” as opposed to will it be genetically modified so, you know, that’s the real nitty gritty of it, so people like myself were very much: “When were we asked about this?” And then: “But that’s our park!” was the next thing: “But we don’t need a motorway!” was the next thing. You watched people going through that process, I did it myself, and they said all the pretty much exact same things and then the beautiful moment was when they said: “And who’s responsible for this?” And then you go: “Strathclyde Regional Council.” And we did lots of things about that to Strathclyde Regional Council and so people were going through the old school politics, quite right, imagining for a moment they had a say, wondering why they never got their say and then challenging the individual responsible for that. There was a lot of that went on but of course, when you’re in the camp ... like I said, we learned map reading. We were shown how the road would work or how it wouldnae work, more to the point, and ... you know, so you learned that. You also discussed the ozone. I’d never really been ... I’d seen a wee bit here and there on the news but I was a working class woman bringing up two kids, it wasnae high on my agenda and so then the realisation that actually the ozone and the effects on the environment, oil, use of oil, car industry and the knock on effect on me and my children, quite selfishly ... started to really worry me, so it was that anger that turns to actual worry! You’re like that: “Oh! This is about something a lot bigger!” and you go through a kind of PhD on the environment on the Free State. We had a university! We did have Pollok Free State Uni and we did study there. And so, you know, I started to think about it a lot and we all did in Pollok and you found your parents and grandparents and people talking about pollution for the first time. I really, really mean that. No to be brutal to the people, I was that person myself, but discussing the bigger issues of climate change, realisation, all the cars ... It was a simple ... “All they cars are gonna be pumping pollution, my Anne’s already got asthma!” People were starting to put that together: “When were we asked? We’re losing our park. What are we getting? Smoke in place of it.” And people started to hark back to other period in time. They talked about it at public meetings, you know, the mining industry in that area. There had been mines there a long time ago at the turn of the century and so on and people started to hark back to things like that and discuss pollution and remember when hardly anybody had a car and, you know, it was quite nostalgic journey that people took in their minds and then I always described it that what eventually happened as a result of that publicity in the papers, the argument in the bus shelters or the post office between people in Pollok, you know? Somebody would say: “A bunch of nutters up the Pollok Free State, have you seen the state of them?” and then somebody would come back and go: “Well, actually, they’ve got a point! I know they look weird but they’ve got a point!” (laughs) And you’d hear these discussions playing out and, ultimately, these discussion ended up talking about: “We’re gonnae get polluted, our environment is bad. You cannae chop down all them trees! We need trees for the planet!” And people started to learn and were interested to learn about what was really happening to them and they were horrified to learn what was really happening to them. And so I always described it, from my point of view cos I took that journey as well, is seeing the world ... or seeing the ozone fae the pavement and no fae space, really seeing it deep down dirty in Pollok and looking upwards and outwards and panicking a wee bit, as opposed to some airy fairy abstract discussion that happens in Newsnight or something like that. The problem really belonged to the people and the people became aware of the problem and they became aware of climate change and that scared them because ultimately they lost the battle and so everything they had learned about, the dangers that would be visited upon them and subsequently the changes that have taken place in that area have outstretched far our worst nightmares, I have to say. People ... they know, they learned and they articulated that in the most beautiful Glaswegian sense possible which is worth quids because, you know, you can try and recycle, you can try and teach people about the environment, you can bring out as much glossy fancy gear as you possibly like but unless you can get that through a working class filter and into the community ... And unfortunately we had the backdrop of the reality as well. We could show: “Trees are gone, road is here!” Unfortunately we had that model that we could show but that’s what I say, you know? The construction on the M77 hatched more awareness than every environmental awareness programme ever because people lost so much but they’ve come back fighting, most of them, you know?

This was also at the time of Poll Tax and Criminal Justice Bills and that kind of stuff. Was that kind of feeding into it or affecting it ... ?

Definitely. The Criminal Justice Stuff ... It was the tail end of Poll Tax. I’d lived in England during the Poll Tax stuff, I’d no political awareness whatsoever so I wasnae in on that. I knew it was bad but that was about it. Hard to engage with it, kind of thing. Outta reach a wee bit for me. And the Criminal Justice stuff ... Again, personally speaking, meant nothing to me. People of Pollok? Meant nothing to them really but it was all happening at the same time and certainly as protestors and as groups of people that were now forming in groups of people, there was legislation coming in saying: “You’re no allowed to form as a group of people!” And people, again, were just getting shown very clearly the implications of legislation and the intrusion in their lives and their rights, again. How much more did the people of Pollok need really? So this was all feeding in at the same time so there was the political aspects falling into place as well. It’s no a coincidence of course that people were rising up against roads. I mean, there’s a whole massive road building programme across the UK at the time so a lot of this legislation was coming in as a result of the protests and the anti-nuclear stuff, you know? A lot of that was being pushed through to deal with these voices that were saying: “Hang on a minute!” So when you find yourself in the middle of it and then you look at the legislation that’s coming through and you go: “Woah! It’s hard enough at the moment doing anything about this! It’s going to get harder.” So it made sense that these things would link up together. And the education was already in place, in terms of opening up our minds, and so here was some new information. And there’s nothing better than somebody saying to you: “This is a problem because of that,” and you can see this and that in front of you and that’s what was happening in Glasgow. Quite an unusual circumstance and quite an unusual collision of events so we had to then defy the Criminal Justice Bill. We had to then start defying that because unless we defied that we were impotent in relation to the M77. You had to take it all on because it was taking us all on and we were just ... (laughs) So you were demonstrating against the Criminal Justice Bill as it was at the time. Huge demonstrations in Glasgow. They were trying to ... You would turn up for huge demonstrations and then the police would say: “You cannae demonstrate! You can’t march through Glasgow, it’s illegal!” And we’d go: “Oh no it’s not!” Cos we’d just been standing against hundreds of cops for weeks on end and we were scared of nothing and so, you know, the Free State would turn up in all it’s beauty for these demonstrations which meant people dressed as butterflies, people dressed in all sorts of fantastic outfits, so there was a great deal of creativity all around this. And so we would join in with that demonstration. People were being politicized by a number ... Poll Tax has definitely kicked that off and there was a left unity developing in Glasgow in particular around the M77 and the backdrop of the Poll Tax, or the kinda hangover from the Poll Tax at the time and then the new legislation through the Criminal Justice Act ... It was lovely because people were able to learn ... I was able to learn quite quickly: “What was going on here? Who was responsible? What they were trying to do? What would be the outcome? How would this affect our community? How would this affect me?” So you could learn that quite easily and there was a lot of main players now starting to come into the whole thing, political bodies. The left were ... There was red flags everywhere, there was green flags everywhere and there was a real springboard for something more to come of this. That’s how I felt. It looked like something was really developing in Glasgow and people were: “Enough is enough, just stop it.” If we had never had the M77, don’t know that that many of us would really have went: “Hmm, Criminal Justice Act? That’s gonnae affect me really badly.” I wouldnae have saw how that would’ve affected me. I didn’t go to raves and I didnae protest, other than the M77, so that wouldn’t have meant anything to me yet it would’ve affected my life without me realising it so you’re gifted in battle like that, we were gifted. Yeah, everybody was getting together! People were sharing ideas. People were saying: “Let’s march together!” They were saying: “Well, you come to our demo, we’ll come to your park! Great idea!” And so that was it, communities were linking up. Very working class protest and the people who came who were coming, as I said, from Denmark, from Canada, from all over the world, were terrific. They were certainly ... A few folk who were fae very well educated backgrounds certainly never grew up in a place like Pollok but they were an absolute asset to the whole movement, came with miles and miles of knowledge and information that was then shared, you know, into that working class community. A role for everybody and this was just growing through the government being as awful as they were and are at the time. It was just growing, everybody was connecting.

Back to the Free State itself ... Were you there for the ... There was a kind of period, from what other people were telling me, that the actual conflict with the road hit a high point but then ... The road got built but the camp continued for a bit longer. Were you part of it after that?

Yeah, I was. I was part of it after that. As the trees had gone, the gap was there. This area no longer resembled the area that it had been. It was completely changed for the worse. The camp continued. Lots of people stayed there. We kept a watchful eye on what was going on. The camp had supplied something to the community and the community had supplied something to the camp and ... And I said earlier on, dismantling the camp was a lot harder than keeping the camp going. There was a huge attachment to this baby, this child. Here we had a fire that had never gone out in over two years! Over two years, not once. Somebody was always responsible for keeping that fire burning and that fire symbolised something really important. It symbolised the struggle. It symbolised our care for the environment and it symbolised community and so who was gonna ever say: “Right, let’s quit. Let’s stick the fire out and walk away”? That sounds just like a pile of words but it meant an awful lot more than that. And so we stayed for a while. We linked up with other things that were happening. I went on to the M74 protest. I found out, when I did my map-reading course in the Free State and I remember saying to Colin ... he showed me a map and goes: “There’s the M77, blah-di-blah” and I went: “Oh, there’s a blue line where I live in Govanhill! That map’s wrong, there’s no motorway in Govanhill.” And he went: “No Rosie, this is proposed motorways. They propose a motorway for Govanhill.” And I was like: “Oh no! I’m the common denominator! Motorways are following me!” And sure enough, I discovered that ... And I’m digressing as usual but I said to Colin: “God, what we gonnae do about it?” and he passed me the map and said, “No. What are you going to do about?” So I was sent of like a young apostle of Colin to deal with the M74, which we did. So the camp still had, for me ... You could touch base. You could go back there and you could comfort each other. The community could still come. You could still have meetings and sing long songs but it was inevitable that it had to go. I wasn’t there when it actually ... I don’t think I could’ve been there when it actually stopped, the minute it ... I don’t think I could’ve witness that, wimp that I am. Emm, yeah ... So it just kind of became ... Yeah, a wee fire should still be burning there. It just had to stop I suppose but there was that wee period afterwards ... I remember it as quite ... We had some laughs. We tried to help each other by having some laughs. We were broken hearted, there was bloody about to be a road opened that we had tried so hard to prevent, and we scowled at the workers that came to build it. And Colin had made sculptures of wolves and things that were screaming at the road and they were put in place and they were screaming at the road and ... But that’s my memory of the aftermath and then I moved on to the M74 and then I would go and try to get people fae the M77 to come and help me on the M74, which they did and we did some protesting at Eglington Toll, for the M77ers coming up to fight against the M74. Lindsay Keenan and myself then ran with that ball because we were local to the road and everybody was exhausted. Yeah, so that’s my only memory. It’s going back to be sad and to cheer people up and sit wi’ your back to the road and try and continue to ... The sculpting and the artwork and Colin always trying to make a positive out of a negative, you know, trying to continue things. And the fire, the all important fire.

Did you know Walter Morrison?

I did know Walter Morrison, aye I did.

Cos he seems like a link to that kind of older Glasgow ...

Yeah. Walter, I met him there ... Oh, lovely man. A blaze of white hair, a white moustache, everybody’s grandfather, everybody’s grandfather. Working class, articulate, left wing, and so gentle at the same time. What a combination. And ... So we would be running around in our boots and skirts and strange hair and everything else and that’s what we looked like cos that’s what happens when you live in a tree and things and so ... And the Walter would turn up and he knew, he knew the patter. He commanded respect, he commanded it. You couldnae disrespect this man. Even the councillors found it hard to deal with him because of that and he was a wonderful man and a courageous man and an inspiration, but he was your grandpa! He was your camp grand-daddy. Sad ... I think he got an OBE eventually, an MBE! He got one of the awards, one of the Queeny things. And we all slagged him: “Aw Walter, what you doing taking that?” you know? But he laughed it off and everything else. He said: “Good people have nominated me for it. I’m mortified,” he used to say: “I’m mortified but good people have nominated me therefore ... this and I don’t want to tell them no.” And I thought: “Go and get it you old soul, you deserve everything you get!” So he was lovely. And he was courageous, like everybody, you know? But he was the voice of reason. Any shenanigans, Grampa Walter could sort it all out. Always very warm, very determined and just ... Authority, he had it in the most beautiful working class way. He was lovely.

What, for you, has been like the legacy? You’ve spoken a lot already about how it gave you a voice and things but maybe in terms of ... Like what kind of lessons we could apply to now, to what’s happening in Glasgow now?

What’s happening in Glasgow now? Well undoubtedly the struggle against the M77 switched a light on in thousands of people! I mean, I don’t say that lightly. Thousands of people emerged from several years wi lights switched on. Certainly, personally, I changed beyond recognition. It was the most important period of my life, I have to say. GalGael has emerged. The Govanhill Grove that Danny Alderslowe built in a beautiful garden in the street where I live where we don’t have gardens, so we got a garden which Danny has made. And so a lot of things have come, physically, fae the fight against the M77. I suppose one of the most important things is the less visible one, where people learned ... how they could be shafted! People learned right in their own back yard: “If you just close your eyes for a minute, God knows what might happen to you. If you do not keep on the ball in relation to changes in your community ...” There are political activists certainly throughout Pollok but beyond ... definitely beyond Pollok, who will never turn their back or ignore any massive changes in their community. The massive changes continue, of course they do, but that empowerment in the face of such a struggle has been the making of many people. You cannae underestimate what that means, you know? So the people, in their workplace they’ll change things. The people bringing up their children, they’ll change things. The kiss from the camp ... it is. It’s like a kiss. Everybody who was there will talk like I talk about it. It was a tremendous experience that changed people’s lives, without doubt! So I think the legacy is a huge amount of empowered people that will pass that one through generations. A great comradrie that built up there that continues to this day! Still, to this day, we’re still very connected and just so warm and ... Oh, a shared experience, you know, between the individuals and the groups there. Pollok, the people of Pollok ... I mean, I still go back and forward. My brothers and that still live in Pollok and people of Pollok, they thumb their nose at that road every time they pass it, you know? It’s congested. We were right. It’s an eyesore and it’s no taking any traffic off the roads, it’s putting traffic on the roads. So a lot of people can go: “Yeah. We were right!” That’s very empowering as well. Councillors were smoked out. Strathclyde Regional Council were smoked out for their inability to deal with the community, to listen to the community, to exchange information with the community, so heads rolled politically as a result as well. But I think a Scottish Left emerged, an environmental movement emerged, a working class environmental movement emerged ... A knowledge of our woods, our space, our clean air, or lack of it, emerged that might’ve gone unnoticed unless the focus had been drawn. Should I thank them for the M77? No. I’m no saying that but I’m just saying that I know many a person who ... I found my voice ... A bloody choir of voices were discovered there! And that wasnae only because of the road, that was because of the nature of the people that were there. That was because of the non-judgmental attitude of everyone in the camp. That was because of the democracy, the structures, the support and the tenderness. There was a huge tenderness in Pollok Free State as well and that developed and grew people who otherwise wouldnae have perhaps experienced that type of ... that level of good, decent, strong, courageous human nature. So people changed for the better. Community changed for the better and people went on to do other things of that ilk and knew ... We all learned, long before the bad thing happened, we learned to be five years ahead of it. We learned the decision making process back to front. We learned to paper push, petition sign, flyer drop, public meeting speaking ... We, all of us, learned everything about that. And then I’m glad to say that we all went to our various corners of the map and continued it because it was so powerful and you were so aware that there was nothing else you can do and you pass on that baton and it is a phenomenon that happened as a result of that, that you can touch it. You can see it. And I go to lots of things. I go to lots of meetings, I go to lots of AGMs, I go to all sorts of different forums and groups and different things and I’ll tell you now, I can hardly remember the last time I went to any of that and never met somebody that had been kissed by the camp, that hadnae been ... You know, there’s always somebody and you go: “Awww, you!” And you’re never surprised to see them there because they found their voice and they found their feet and they said: “Never again!” and they got in among it. So I think that is the best legacy and you see that’s something that passes on fae generation and develops throughout the community and that’s as big and as ugly and as spreadable as pollution is. I’ll tell you what, the good thing that come out of that is bigger and better and will spread an awful lot further. God, I get so carried away and my arms I’m waving around! But it’s true. (laughs)

Do you think the Free State was like an alternative Glasgow? Like what Glasgow could be?

Ah! Good questions! Eh ... The Free State ... Aye. It had every bit of Glasgow in it. It was feisty ... As a community, it was feisty, it was cheeky, it was funny, it liked a drink, it could run, it could climb ... Aye, it was very much a wee microcosm of Glasgow. Although everybody there wasnae Glaswegian but you soon learn to be Glaswegian, don’t you? And so it definitely ... Aye. It was a wee snapshot of Glasgow and it was a wee snapshot of Glasgow’s history. You know, the Glasgow that did march. The kind of John Maclean ... The shipyards, the Red Clydesiders, Matt McGinn ... I could keep going on and saying things like that. The camp existed off all of that and that kinda awkward, West of Scotland thing that a lot of us have was pinged out of us and so it was all of the best ... It was Glasgow at New Year, every day! (both laugh)

Some of that history’s getting lost, that identity of ... Like the Red Clydeside, the Glasgow kind of people standing up for themselves ... Is it getting eroded?

Yeah, yeah! It is getting ... It is, as you say, getting lost. It’s been deliberately destroyed. Glasgow’s history, you know, is just phenomenal in terms of people standing up against what’s wrong and I come fae a family like that that I’m very proud of, going back back back centuries. And I think that ...You know, the architecture ... even the road itself can change things quite dramatically. How we live ... Where I live in Govanhill, everybody’s ... These days the front page of the papers complain: “Roma People Stand On Street Corner.” Sorry, my Grandmother and her Mother before her and my Mother and everybody stood in the street corner. They had their pillows in the window and they looked out and discussed things across the street and across the buildings and you see it on all the paintings and photographs of old Glasgow. Industrial community this, poverty and everything else, but it’s a real community. It’s real left wing, Red, at that time Labour, kinda movement: “Don’t take no crap, we’re fighting for our jobs,” the rent strikes ... God almighty, what a history! But if you change how people live, if you separate people with great concrete structures, if you encourage people to get in to little tin boxes with four wheels and go from A to B instead of having a more shared experience in public transport or walking and things like that, if you create fear, discomfort, divide, poverty gaps ... then the potential for that fight and that struggle is depleted and, like I said earlier on, you cannae then pass it on to the next generation. They have to re-find it, if it’s to be found. And so I think, sadly, aye. I think that’s the case now and I think people are so busy and caught up with things, bringing up a family and working full time. It’s really hard to live these days, it’s really, really hard and so there’s less ability to have that: “I’m really annoyed, let’s walk up the street with our fists in the air, waving a red flag and go to the council and take it on!” People are disengaging with politics as well. The voting in Glasgow, only Bootle in Liverpool is lower in terms of turnout, and Shettleston constituency anyhow ... It’s a lot of political piffle but that’s an indicator of people disengaging with the decision making process and being outside it and no being in control in any shape, form or size and therefore they’re never likely to challenge it full on or fully understand what’s being done in their name! And that’s just no Glaswegian, it’s not. If you go into Glasgow city centre, you might look along the river and go: “Woah, that’s beautiful!” and it is. It’s nice lights and there’s soulless buildings everywhere and they’re not social housing, they private very fancy housing. But you could be in Berlin; you could be in Amsterdam; you could be anywhere so even the physical characteristics of this city are being washed away and I don’t think you can underestimate the importance of that, the association, the identity that people have ... particularly with a city like Glasgow. When you start stripping it of everything that makes it Glasgow, it’s like stripping a person of everything that makes them them till they’re unrecogniseable. So I think there’s a lot of reasons and I think they’re all political, planning and making decisions ... the way we live our lives, the great supermarket chains that are on every street corner, the loss of our local shop where we chatted, where you had an identity, where things mattered and you could discuss local issues ... Now you just stand in a great big bleeping queue where somebody puts barcodes through a machine. Aye, you cannae underestimate the importance of community because community gets together and fights back, no so easy these days until the streets are on fire and then people will go: “Oops! Why are the streets on fire?” So it’s a shame. People are so busy, they cannae see it coming anymore. It’s a shame but ... Aye, need to take that on as well! (laughs)

Is there anything else you feel like ...?

Umm ... I just ... I think you had to be in Pollok Free State and in the protest and involved in it and lots of people were. See, if you just look at it as it’s ... you know, as you see it on film, as you see it at the time, it can look pretty weird. It can look ... It could even look lazy. It could look like it was a pile of people all milling around but, you see, we were always too fast and too busy when we were really at work to film. The passion and the emotion is just ... I don’t know if anything’s ever happened like us. There’s no way ... I go to Faslane several times a year. It’s different. It matters and I’ll continue to go but there was such a bond and such an amazing thing happened between those people and we almost ... almost something that happens in families, where you’re telepathic. You know what you need to do at any given moment because we just ... If something happened, you responded. If you thought something was gonna happen, you got there before it and nobody ever went: “Oh, that was really daft!” You know, so you could actually just go for it, as long as you remembered your basic training. So it was dead dynamic; dead, dead busy and very emotional but, you know, it became a body with a heartbeat. It became ... you know, unlike anything I’ve ever experienced in my life and I’ve experienced lots and I’ve experienced lots of different types of groups, but never have I seen such a gelled, emotional ... something that was born and lived it’s life. And we were all just wee bits and pieces in it, wee cogs. So the real vision of it was more about a feeling and always takes me back to the fire, always takes me back to the fire. That was the heart of the Pollok Free State. That sounds hippy, it sounds silly but when you’ve been running through the forest and you’re soaked up to your knees, you’ve been up a tree with those wet jeans on for a wee while ... you maybe got dragged away by the cops and things like that and then you were let loose back to the camp ... There’s nothing better than it, at that moment at time. There’s nothing better than a fire at night when you’re exhausted and you’re getting ahead. There’s nothing better than a fire when you’re making some baked potatoes in it and the smell’s coming up through the trees. I could go on, you know? And so that was where we assembled, that’s what kept us warm, that’s what fed us, and that’s what enabled us to ... So it was very emotional and very personal and ... I don’t know if there’s anything else quite like it. There will be but I don’t know it, where something happened as magically. It was as magic as the Bluebell Woods which are gone but it was as magic as the Bluebell Woods. The magic was actually there and became part of the fairy tale! (laugh)