22.05.2025
Gangs of Glasgow
What lies behind the current upsurge in violence? Scott Evans looks at the history, the drugs trade - and commends the policy of harm-reduction and professional supervision when it comes to drug use
Scotland has a well-known reputation for gang-related violence, specifically emanating out of the west coast around Glasgow. Rather than focus on the salacious details of the current flare-up I want to give a broad overview going back 150 years.
Over the course of the 19th century, anti-Catholic sentiment in Scotland - at that time an overwhelmingly Protestant country - grew substantially. The Catholic population had a marginal presence at the start of the century, when large numbers of Irish Catholic immigrants came to Glasgow. At the same time the Orange Order and Ulster loyalism grew as a result of significant (although smaller) Ulster Protestant migration.1
The Irish immigrants settled around the River Clyde looking for jobs in the booming industries of shipping, textiles, metalwork and so on, though many nevertheless remained unemployed. The Catholic centres included the increasingly densely populated Gorbals, facilitated by high-occupancy slum tenement accommodation, and is supposed to have reached around 40,000-55,000 people per square kilometre by the 1930s, which would today put it comfortably near the top of the list of the densest neighbourhoods in the world.2 At a time when British rule in most of Ireland had been brought to an end, Glasgow began to see the Protestant ‘razor gangs’, named after the weapons they carried.
Billy Fullerton founded the infamous Billy Boys razor gang in around 1924. They wore militaristic uniform, paid subscriptions which could be used to pay off police fines and purchase uniforms, and sang songs including the inflammatory ‘Billy Boys’ song which includes the lines, “We’re up to our knees in Fenian blood, Surrender or you’ll die”, banned from Scottish football in 2011.
Fullerton and his gang worked with sections of the right in breaking up leftwing meetings like those of the Communist Party and in strike-breaking. Fullerton, who received a medal for his interventions against the 1926 General Strike, became a member of the British fascists and later formed the Glasgow branch of Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts.
A few decades prior, in late 1887, Celtic football club had been formed by a group of Catholic priests and eventually sectarian violence, fuelled by the gangs and the competing national-religious identities, would find an outlet for expression in the football rivalry of the Rangers-Celtic ‘Old Firm’.
The ‘defeat’ of the razor gangs is often attributed to chief constable Percy Sillitoe (later director general of MI5) and his ‘boot and baton’ approach, which he had honed during similar issues down in Sheffield. Some of the over-the-top alarmism in the present-day tabloid coverage is at least in part intended to create an image of lawless chaos in society to produce a demand for the ‘law and order’ wing of bourgeois politics to come in and ‘sort it out’ in this way. But it would be a mistake to dismiss the real issues around this form of criminal activity on that basis.
Following World War II, in order to address the housing problem in places like the Gorbals, slum tenements were demolished, ‘new towns’ were developed, overspill estates were built and large tower blocks of flats were built.
A number of ‘schemes’ (the Scottish term for ‘council estate’) were built in the 1950s to rehouse Glasgow’s slum population - over a quarter of a million people were relocated. Housing was more spacious and provided desirable features like indoor toilets (!), but there were little to no local amenities for people to make use of, alongside very few worthwhile jobs. Market urbanist magical thinking, the prefab rush-job characterising much of it, and the tax-take needs of the Glasgow Corporation (now Glasgow City Council) are to blame for the failures.
Drink and drugs
Without the provision of ‘third places’ people make their own. And with trauma unable to be fully dealt with comes a need to take a mental break - sometimes by turning to mind-altering substances. Drink and drugs and background noise (mindless TV, radio, music, whatever) can help fill the day of the unemployed with nothing to do. Bored, frustrated young people can go out with their friends, but into a built environment whose every nook and cranny repeatedly symbolises its utter lack of care for or interest in you. Some young people may just need to get away from what might be an unsafe or unstable home environment. Some are pushed deep into a kind of ‘survival mode’, where the world really feels like a war of all against all.
One illustrative episode of this is ‘the ice cream wars’.3 What were originally ice cream vans began passing through these new ‘schemes’ in the late 1950s, but they also sold cigarettes and other assorted things and were like mini-corner shops on wheels. The alienation and despair leading to drug use combined itself with these vans, which started being used to sell drugs, with rival operators fighting for control over various routes. The major event of the ‘ice cream wars’ came with the killing of six members of a family, which, combined with police corruption, led to a ‘miscarriage of justice’, which was only overturned in 2004.4
Why the violence? Private property - including debt repayment obligations - requires a method of enforcement, provided for by the state. When what is made illegal is something like drugs, for which demand is relatively high, an illegal economy is inevitable - and those involved need alternative ‘enforcement mechanisms’. A fight for monopoly control over supply through ‘turf wars’ and open violence becomes inevitable.
On January 13 2010, Kevin ‘Gerbil’ Carroll was shot dead in the car park of a popular supermarket in broad daylight. He was an ‘enforcer’ for the Daniel family, which was infamous for carrying out ‘alien abductions’ and other intimidation tactics.
Jamie Daniel, the boss until his death in 2016, was born in the rapidly deindustrialising Glasgow. His dad died when he was 10 and his mother raised their children in Possilpark, one of the most deprived areas in the city. He had a violent early start in life, then later became associated with a Scottish-Pakistani family which was able to smuggle in high-volume, high-purity heroin, developing networks with people across England as well.
In the 1960s through to the 80s other well-known gangs were involved in loan sharking, protection rackets and robbery, but with the Daniels it was more underground and focused on drugs. This all broke out more into the open in the early 2000s, when two people associated with the rival Lyons gang stole a large stash of cocaine from the Daniels.
Its leader, Steven Lyons, is thought to have developed connections abroad with the Irish based Kinahan family, one of the world’s largest transnational organised crime groups. So the Daniels, Lyons and Kinahans may all be involved in the current flare-up. An extradition treaty signed between Ireland and the United Arab Emirates which could result in the Kinahans’ extradition this year may well be adding complications to the ongoing feud.
Moving a section of the problem off the streets and into the prisons, as the police constantly proudly say they are doing, is hardly helpful. Others inside the prisons - often for more petty crimes - can be more deeply incorporated into these networks and the tips and tricks of the trade. Communication between prisoners and those remaining on the outside continues. Meanwhile, new people are born into this mess every day, eventually ready and able to be recruited into the various activities.
The fact that young men join the various groups across the streets of Glasgow - many of whom simply grow out of it and never touch organised crime - results from the need to feel safety (in numbers) and belonging (group identity, collective formative experience), and for some lads it is the opportunity to enact ‘competitive masculinity’. The question of whether to participate is directly posed to many young people and, if you do find yourself in the shit as a result, maybe in a violent altercation, then calling the police is often not an option - if you do, you are a grass, and that is just going to cause you more issues. So it is very difficult to pull in witnesses for these crimes and, as a result, a lot of this low-level violence will tick along without any police involvement at all.
The ‘Violence Reduction Unit’ in Scotland takes an approach which, I think, can be fairly described as focused on massive surveillance and short-term group psychology. That includes a lot of stop-and-search, general increased police presence, even alcohol-use monitoring bracelets, which first saw use outside of the USA here in Scotland (the VRU takes its inspiration from Operation Ceasefire5 in Boston). This requires an awful lot of coordination and community involvement, so all this amounts to an inherently fragile ‘peace.’
Policy options
Over-focus on the drug wars does lead people to neglect the more boring everyday aspects of NED (‘non-educated delinquent’) culture in Scotland. But with the presence of organised crime this stuff unfortunately does present itself as a potential funnel into these more societally damaging dynamics.
I would commend the Scottish Socialist Party for supporting a harm-reduction approach to drug use, including legal drug clinics for registered addicts.6 The first such clinic opened in Glasgow’s west end earlier this year.7 But I take it the comrades still stop short of supporting the legalisation of all drugs - which would break the very core of the black markets.
On the other hand, drugs like heroin, with its ongoing addiction crisis, account for both ‘harm to self’ and ‘harm to others’, which will be inevitable thanks to the immiseration and alienation capitalism naturally produces. In other words, such drugs should be provided by licensed healthcare professionals in safe settings, aiming to gradually reduce physiological and psychological dependence. Provision should also be allowed in strictly regulated quantities by licensed vendors to people wanting to experiment.
The capitalist system always seem to find one way or another to empower the worst rather than the best humanity has to offer. For the city of Glasgow and its people to really reach its full potential we need nothing less than international socialist revolution.
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The Orange Order itself, formed in the late 18th century in Northern Ireland, had significant roots in prior Scottish Protestant immigration to Northern Ireland. The Scottish contingent of the Plantation of Ulster - sponsored by the British monarchy - were Presbyterian lowlanders, and then later more immigration followed the ‘seven lean years’ of famine conditions in Scotland.↩︎
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See T Brennan, ‘Gorbals: a study in redevelopment’ Scottish Journal of Political Economy (1957), which claims a decline by about a fifth to 36,000 people from around 1930 to 1951 in a 200-acre area. See also en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_densest_neighborhoods.↩︎
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www.motherjones.com/politics/2006/01/straight-outta-boston.↩︎
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scottishsocialistparty.org/taking-action-on-scotlands-drug-epidemic.↩︎