By Neil Scott
Back in 2018 when I spoke at a NECE conference about my journey from the partitioned landscapes of Ireland to the streets of Glasgow, I was thinking about how borders act as psychological -and physical – fences. I argued that our job as educators is to help young people climb over those fences to become true global citizens. But the more I walk through Glasgow, the more I realise that the most insidious borders aren’t the ones marked on a map or the ones defined by sectarian history. They are the invisible, corporate borders drawn between the leafy suburbs and the working-class schemes.
In the more affluent areas of Glasgow, the streets are defined by what is missing: there are no predatory gambling shops on every corner and no towering hoardings pushing high-sugar, chemical-laden “non-food”. Yet, the moment you cross that invisible line into a working-class community, the landscape changes. You are immediately hit by an assault of advertising. These areas have more hoarding sites per square mile than anywhere else, and they aren’t selling art or culture. They are pushing vapes, alcohol, and “non-food foodstuffs” packed with additives that no human body was ever designed to process.
This is a deliberate architecture of inequality. The corporate world has drawn a border around our schemes, designating them as “sacrifice zones” where the health of the community is traded for profit. Our streets are lined with bookies and fast-food outlets because the system views the working class not as citizens to be nurtured, but as a demographic to be exploited. Harvested. Chewed up, and spat out.
This brings me to the recent article in The Guardian about the Green MP, Hannah Spencer. I have to say, it is superb to finally see a real working-class fighter back in the corridors of power. She is absolutely right to call out the way the political establishment, especially Labour, continues to use tired caricatures of working-class people. They want to talk about greyhound racing bans and flat-cap stereotypes because it’s easier than talking about the systemic corporate violence being done to our health and our environment. Spencer sees through the nonsense, and it is a relief to have a voice in Parliament that understands our lives are not a costume for middle-class politicians to put on when they want to look “authentic”.
As a Teacher, I believe we have a radical responsibility to bring this conversation into the classroom. We cannot talk about “global citizenship” in a vacuum while our students are being targeted by corporate interests the moment they step outside the school gates. We need to make children, and indeed their parents, acutely aware of these borders around their lives.
Schools should be spaces where we deconstruct how working-class communities are specifically targeted by big business. We need to teach the “critical literacy” of the street: why is there a vape shop here but a park there? Why is our local shop filled with additives and sugar while the shops in the West End are filled with fresh produce? By making these corporate borders visible, we empower our young people to reject the roles the system has written for them.
Teaching valuable global citizens means teaching them to recognise when they are being played. It means showing them that the “border” isn’t just something you cross at an airport, or in to England; it is something that determines the quality of the air you breathe and the food available on your corner. We need to stop the caricatures and start dismantling the fences that keep our communities trapped in a cycle of corporate-sponsored ill health.
The borders I grew up surrounded by in Ireland and the social borders I found in Glasgow taught me that identity is fluid, but justice must be concrete. It is time we stopped letting corporations decide what the “working-class experience” looks like. We are more than the additives we are sold and the bets we are encouraged to place. Like Hannah Spencer, we need to fight for a world where your postcode doesn’t determine your proximity to poison.
