Deborah Orr: For many in Glasgow East, Labour picked up where Thatcher left off

The whole point about Glasgow East is that it is a place that has been completely ignored for many years. Now, with a by-election coming up, it has suddenly become a fascinating part of the world – not for its own sake, of course, but because it will next week be playing a walk-on part in the great game that is Westminster politics.

What obsesses Westminster at the moment is the future of Gordon Brown. So it has projected its obsession on to the constituency. The election is being viewed as some sort of referendum on Brown's leadership, and of course the result will have its implications for the Prime Minister. But Glasgow East's residents will be voting, instead, on the way they've been governed for the past 30 years, which is something that the Scottish National Party understands only too well.

I'm not from Glasgow myself, but I share the background of its people. I'm from Motherwell, a satellite town of the city, that shares almost identically its recent history of industrial meltdown and its consequent social cost. Like everyone from that part of the world, I recognise the truth in the picture that is being painted – of poverty, drugs, neglect, poor health, bad housing – but also hate and resent it.

It's true, as political commentators have been so fond of pointing out over the past few weeks, that life expectancy in some parts of the city and its environs is lower than that of Gaza, and true too that the area bucks the overwhelming general health trend, so that in some corners people are living shorter lives now, not longer ones.

But the population, and the way people live, is far more mixed than these bleak statistics can express. East Glasgow's miracle is that it does continue to have vitality, despite all of its privations. Back home this week, I didn't find that there was much appetite for discussion of the immediate political situation. People here have long and bitter memories, and they dislike the misery snapshot that the furore around the election has produced.

Brendan McLaughlin, who has lived in Glasgow all his life, put it best. "What people don't realise," he told me, "is that there are four distinct patterns in Glasgow East. The different places have different cultural heritages. There's the inner city, that was traditionally dependent on cotton mills – Bridgeton, say, and Calton. There's the places that were annexed to Glasgow – Shettleston, Parkhead – places that were wee towns already, total communities that already had social structures in place.

"And East Glasgow has its affluent parts too – Dennistoun, Bargeddie, all over the East End there are still huge old houses. There's a juxtaposition of wealth and poverty. Finally, there's council scheme East Glasgow – Easterhouse, Barlanark, Ruchazie, Garthamlock. They are the places that had no structure in place, that were built so that people could live near their work."

When he was a boy, McLaughlin recalls, everyone had an expectation of work, wherever they lived. He never saw trouble as a boy, he says, and never saw the police. The women ran the social side of life, and the men went to work. He knows that dark and criminal things happened. But it occurred out of sight, beyond the fabric of daily life.

He is awed still at how quickly and recklessly it was all dismantled – the mills, the steelworks, the shipbuilding, the car-making. And he remains appalled at what swept in to take its place. McLaughlin turns conventional wisdom on its head, and asks me to remember all the now barely remembered japes that the Conservative government thought up to disguise the stratospheric unemployment figures. If anyone invented welfare dependency, he asserts with some force, it was Thatcher.

The single most damaging of those statistic-juggling innovations, he says, was the one that disqualified 16-18-year-olds from claiming unemployment benefit, at a time when their parents were adjusting to the horrible new reality of wagelessness themselves. Young people at that time, he argues, were sitting ducks.

In the early 1980s, McLaughlin was in his 30s, doing youth work to get pin money while his family lived on his mature student's grant. He still remembers the young guys in his football team – who thought drugs were for hippies – telling him that loads of heroin would soon be coming, but that they would not be involving themselves with such namby-pamby hobbies.

Some years later, he met up with some of them, to be told that a couple had died of addiction, and that most had been ruined by it. McLaughlin is still perplexed by the sudden, roaring tsunami of addictive substances that belted through Britain during deindustrialisation.

Like many Glaswegians, he reviles Thatcher to this day. But his own political activism has for many years been directed against the unremittingly Labour government that has ruled locally from the city chambers. Through Thatcher, through Major, though Blair, though Brown, he says, they were the people who could have made changes, made noises, but chose not to. Devolution, under Labour, he notes, did precious little as well.

McLaughlin holds no great torch for the SNP. But over the years that have passed, this Glaswegian socialist, a success himself, and comfortably retired, has reached the implacable conclusion that it is Labour that is the enemy of the people. The great wonder, in Glasgow East, is that there s still so many people who have not yet come round to his way of thinking.

There are male rats, and then there are female rats...

Ronnie Wood, the Rolling Stone who has found himself in rehab after an exhausting binge in Ireland, certainly qualifies as an old fool. But it is the young fool he has dragged into his messy private life one has to feel sorry for.

Ekaterina Ivanova is 20, and foolish enough to think it wise to inform the press that she loves the old roué, and that "as long as there is a chance of happiness for me and Ronnie, I have nothing to say." The sad thing is that, although the world and his estranged wife sees Ekaterina as a minx on the make with no compunction about involving herself with a married man, she is probably quite sincere in her belief that she has embarked on a great romance.

She does not see that she and Wood are unlikely to experience any happiness, even if her beau decides to continue the relationship. Wood is too old to live on romance alone, and the pop world can be surprisingly judgemental. If the pair imagine they can make a go of it, they are going to make an odd, lonely couple. For Ekaterina, only reality television reckons. The little dear is probably silly enough to imagine such an eventuality to be nearly as desirable as Ronnie.

* Sharon Coleman was forced to leave her job because her employers would not give her flexible working hours to care for her disabled son. Now she has secured a judgment in her favour from the European Court of Human Rights. It will have implications for millions of carers.

It might seem remarkable that Coleman found the time, the energy and the commitment to fight so hard and for so long. Except that everyone I've ever known in a similar situation learns quickly that it is part of a carer's job to hit the phones, hit the internet, fill out the forms, and find time to fight for every little concession and every little victory. For people like Coleman, immersion in the system is a demanding part of the caring effort. Fighting like a Panzer division for every single right becomes second nature. Because otherwise, you go under, and take your loved one with you. Hers is the story of every carer, writ large. She is a star.

* It is tremendously telling – and not in a particularly good way – that the differences between the brains of men and women have only just been discovered because no one even thought until now of setting female rats to work in the laboratory. Who, after all, wants to employ a girl, when she might start having babies and ruining everything? Even when she's a girl rat.