"We need to spend a lot of money on social work"

Retailer Mo Razzaq is a well-known Labour member of South Lanarkshire Council. He tells Holyrood you couldn’t pay him to leave Blantyre - but interventions are needed to tackle the issues blighting the lives of constituents.

Describe the area you represent in one sentence. It’s a deprived area that has a very tight community with higher rates of unemployment and poverty. 

How long have you lived there? I’ve been here for 36 years, so I’m a local now. I was in Bellshill before and wanted to move closer to work. 

Tell us something we won’t know about your local area.  It’s the home of David Livingstone, the explorer who went to Africa. And we have a David Livingstone Birthplace Museum in the park here as well. It’s a rite of passage for all the local schoolchildren to go.

Who is the best-known person from your area? That would be David Livingstone as well, although there are a few footballers who have come from Blantyre. John Brown is one of them; he was a player for Rangers and Scotland. I support Hamilton and Scotland, although I’ll gladly watch any football. 

What challenges are unique to your particular part of the country?  Just now it feels like the area’s falling apart because there’ve been a lot of community hall closures and centre closures. We have a leisure centre that’s needing to be replaced that we are spending millions of pounds on to keep up the repairs. We’ve got overgrown weeds and potholes in the streets and South Lanarkshire, like every area just now, is really feeling it. Deprivation is a real challenge, and particularly with our town there are higher rates of unemployment. We have fewer cars per capita than the average and some of the statistics are quite depressing. 

What made you stand for election?  This is my third time as councillor. It’s been nine years, and it definitely hasn’t been for the money. If you want to make changes in your area then you need to be there and fight the corner. That’s what this is about. Rather than complaining, I thought it would be better to do some work and try and make some changes to the area. I thought to myself, if I can help resolve some of the issues, it would be amazing.

What’s the one thing Holyrood politicians could do that would be of greatest benefit to the area you represent?  As a retailer, I go to meetings for different things like organised crime. I was in London, and they were talking about some work Birmingham police have done on shoplifting. They did an exercise and one drug addict with a £120-a-day habit will need to steal at least £300-worth of goods to pay for that habit, which is £2,100 a week, which in a year works out at £109,000. That one individual is a one-person crimewave. But rather than jailing them, where they go in and out and go through the same vicious cycle, the council gave them help and they had a very good success rate. With the proper treatment from different bodies getting together, it makes a huge difference to the area. That’s where we’ve got a big issue. We’ve got children who are going to be entering into that trap because their home circumstances are quite poor. To avoid that, we need agencies to be there to help them. We need the funding to spend a bit of money – a lot of money – on social work.

What’s the best bit about living where you do?  The community. We might not be the most affluent area, but there’s a real sense of community and people do help each other out. When something needs done, they go and do it.

Mo Razzaq with Kim Leadbeater MP

Is there a particular word you love using that only people in your part of the country would recognise?  Language in Bothwell is very similar to Glasgow and the one you hear all the time as a retailer is ‘ginger’ for a soft drink. 

If you could live anywhere else, where would it be?  I do have this thing about winning the lottery, and what would I do? Would I move to Bothwell or East Kilbride? The honest truth is I’d probably stay. I have a house in Turkey and I absolutely love it there because of the heat and the culture, but when I thought about it, the first thing is, where are my friends? Where is my family? If I moved to Lanark, I’d be moving away from them, so I’d stay in Blantyre and build a house with a swimming pool.