The Arches closure is bad for Glasgow's health

The Police Scotland area commander in Glasgow city centre said the Arches arts hub had been refused a licence in order to “protect and ensure public safety”, after a 17-year-old died at one of the venue’s club nights. 

“I want to see a vibrant city that welcomes and supports artistic talent but this can absolutely not be at a cost to public safety,” he said.

The decision has seen a backlash from many in the cultural sphere, over 400 of whom signed a letter in support of a campaign to reinstate “a key venue at the centre of Glasgow’s remarkable cultural renaissance of the past 25 years”, but on Friday administrators cut 129 jobs at the venue.

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But leaving aside the profound cultural impact, the decision to close down the Arches demonstrates how far Police Scotland has distanced itself from established public health wisdom in Scotland since the forces merged into one in 2013. 

Drugs, alongside alcohol, suicide and violence, is an outlier contributing to the lowest life expectancy rate in the UK. Sixty per cent of Glasgow’s excess deaths are triggered by these four ‘diseases of despair’, according to the 2011 study by the Glasgow Centre for Population Health. 

Like alcohol, the greatest excesses of drug abuse don’t tend to happen in pubs and clubs, rather, at home or in public spaces.

It’s very hard to see how the Arches, which won gold standard at the Glasgow Community Safety/Strathclyde Police ‘Best Bar None’ awards for six years, can be blamed for making people less safe. It won those awards because of its good communication with police and the levels of training among staff, including first aid and drug training, and it had medical facilities onsite.

To close such a place is resonant of the same ‘zero tolerance’ approach to policing which has seen a crackdown on Edinburgh saunas. Operation Windermere, launched shortly after Police Scotland was formed, saw officers raid sex worker premises and search women for condoms.

Edinburgh’s more tolerant harm reduction approach to prostitution and drug use is world-renowned because of its record in tackling the spread of HIV in the 1980s, but a recent report for the city council’s health and social care committee said the change in approach by Police Scotland has led to less availability of condoms, a fall in sex worker attendance at the NHS Women’s Clinic, and a rise in the rate of Chlamydia and cases of hepatitis B and C.

Taking away the things which keep people safe doesn’t make them safer. It’s replacing pragmatism with punishment. 

The hugely respected Harry Burns said of his own move from practice to public health: “I eventually thought the time had come to stop cutting bits out and start thinking more creatively about doing something to stop the bits that needed to be cut out.”

The sentiment is shared by others. “If public services fail to permit space for prevention, then there will be no actual shift to prevention,” wrote John Carnochan, James Mitchell and Jonathan Sher in the last issue of Holyrood. 

The evidence appears to show Police Scotland is shifting in entirely the opposite direction. 

Meanwhile arts investment itself could be a preventative measure. The Spanish city of Bilbao has shown it can not only boost tourism but also attract inward investment and, crucially, boost civic pride. Hard to do when you close venues with a reputation for being responsible and minimising risk.