Hay Drive doesn’t look like a gangland stronghold. With its whitewashed homes and its looming rows of satellite dishes, it’s a vision of unchanging Scottish suburbia, stolid, dreary, perhaps a little poor. But, last month, this anonymous corner of south Edinburgh exploded into violence. On 4 April, at about 1:20am, a house on Hay Drive was set ablaze. The fire soon spread to a nearby, seriously damaging both. And not only that. Since March, around a dozen properties have faced arson attacks right across the Central Belt, a campaign accompanied by shootings and assaults.
Scotland’s current gang war can feel like a Netflix series, from the mob dynasties and the firebombing to the villains-in-hiding nicknamed “Miami”. The current bout of feuding apparently concerns the theft of a cocaine shipment worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. Yet amid the social media threats and the Costa-del-Dubai exiles, the country’s gangsterism is actually a lot like Hay Drive itself — a strangely retro throwback, to a time before mass migration and when gangsterism was strictly local. It all speaks to the relative isolation of Britain’s Celtic fringe, and offers a useful reminder that not all our problems can be blamed on foreigners.
Much like the country itself, English organised crime is increasingly cosmopolitan. Dominated by multinational gangs, it’s a teeming bazaar, chaotic and transient. Loyalties change and business models adapt, all to the buzz of 24/7 TikTok commentary and grime crews. Criminal intelligence analysts find tracking this stuff like nailing jelly to the wall. By comparison, the Scottish underworld has a vibe reminiscent of a Berkshire high street circa 1995: dependable and dominated by big names. The Daniels and Lyons, two of the long-standing crime families involved in the current feud, might as well be Debenhams and The Gap. To paraphrase another retro classic, it’s a case of two tribes go to war.
I’ve had a taste of crime north of the border. Serving as a London detective, I was sworn in as a constable at Glasgow Sheriff’s Court. It felt curiously like being in an old Western, swearing an oath like a deputy and signing a register. Working on a corruption investigation, I was given local police powers; English cops have no jurisdiction in Scotland (except for specific offences, usually around terrorism). As a London copper, Glasgow felt reassuringly familiar, and not just because it’s my favourite Scottish city. Prior to the 2013 amalgamation of Scottish forces into Police Scotland, the city’s police were part of the Strathclyde force, known as the “Scottish Met”.
In my experience, Met officers enjoyed a good working relationship with their Glasgow counterparts. And, like the Met, surrounding forces saw Strathclyde as overly dominant. They were happy to see it taken down a peg or two. Many Glasgow coppers lamented its passing, as police are wont to do whenever change occurs.
Even so, criticism of the new force is about more than nostalgia. Politics often trumps operational effectiveness, with performance-obsessed restructuring sucking up organisational bandwidth better spent on crimefighting. Relations with a deeply political SNP administration have occasionally been strained too — and that was before the investigation into Nicola Sturgeon. Some officers have also felt the SNP are more focussed on independence than bread-and-butter issues like education, health, or indeed crime. Did this mean the police took their eye off organised crime? This is the immediate context in which Scottish gangsterism should be viewed: that of distracted ministers and a mismanaged police force.
Even so, Scottish mobsterism is about something deeper than bureaucracy. The country only hosts 5.5 million people, or about 8% of the UK population. And, despite its regional differences, it’s 95% white, something England hasn’t been since the Eighties. The occasionally overegged issue of religious sectarianism aside, that makes Scotland practically a monoculture, certainly compared to Birmingham or London. More to the point, these demographics also make the working class communities of Glasgow and Edinburgh less transient, more cohesive, and more able to resist the encroaching globalisation of Somalis or Kurds.
Nor is this simply a Scottish phenomenon. Right across the Celtic fringe, the old ways survive, offering real life folk-horror, with houses burning instead of wicker men. I’m thinking, for instance, of Liverpool, forever an outpost of the Irish Republic. Liverpool boasts the UK’s primary seaport linking the UK to the coca fields of South America. As such, it’s coveted by criminals. Yet law enforcement legend has it that even the brutal Albanian mafia are wary of the city: local Scouse gangs are too well-organised and violent. As for Belfast? Northern Irish gangs overlap with psychotic paramilitaries. They’re armed with assault rifles, and deeply embedded in their communities, strutting like central-casting bad guys in an action movie. The long-suffering, politically hamstrung and underfunded PSNI can only operate a strategy of appeasement and semi-containment.
“Right across the Celtic fringe, the old ways survive”
Contrast all this with London’s traditional crime families. These days, they’re good for little more than straight-to-streaming movies, ghost-written memoirs and the occasional nonagenarian funeral. Terry Adams, the former scourge of Clerkenwell, now spends more time with his art collection. “Dodgy” Dave Courtney shot himself. Other old-school “faces” keep their heads down.
And not only that. For apart from remaining mostly untouched by globalisation’s international criminal diaspora, Scottish criminals also employ an MO The Krays and Charlie Richardson would recognise.
This old-school works on familiarity. On personalities. On an understanding of the other side’s way of doing business, be it drugs or protection rackets or smuggling. Not so much movie talk of “codes” or “honour” — but more of knowing what to expect from whom. The threats, acts of violence and feuding all follow a time-honoured pattern. Furthermore, the criminals enjoy significant ties to the “respectable” non-criminal world. Compared to, say, London? It’s an anachronism. The south’s multicultural postcode gangs, middle-market cocaine dealers and county lines retailers operate in a relative state of freewheeling anarcho-capitalism.
Then there’s corruption. Organised crime of the sort blighting Glasgow and Edinburgh can’t exist without palms being greased. I’m not suggesting Scotland is uniquely prone to graft. It is, however, vulnerable for the reasons I’ve described: a close-knit monoculture, ruled by cliquish elites. This is why I’d suggest political institutions and law enforcement north of the border are disposed to a specific type of compromise. For instance, Glasgow’s Labour-dominated political machine, prior to the ascension of the SNP, was no stranger to scandal.
As for the police, it’s in a similar vein to the corruption that dogged the Met until the early 2000s, some of it involving working-class detectives and the criminals they grew up with. Some years ago, a Scottish detective told me about an investigation into drug money. It ended mysteriously, when the trail meandered too close to establishment figures. In more recent times, Police Scotland’s Organised Crime and Counter Terrorism Unit was recently compromised by corrupt detectives leaking intelligence. That flavour of corruption is less common in London nowadays, replaced by something equally damaging but perhaps more fragmented: corruption stemming from poorly-vetted, hastily-selected cops, led by inexperienced and out-of-touch managers.
What, then, is the answer? As the violence escalates across Scotland’s two largest cities, the SNP-led administration has promised urgent action. A 100-strong task force is on the case, backed up by The National Crime Agency (NCA). As for the gangs themselves, the old ways are both a strength and a weakness. Yes, they’re deep-rooted, tough to infiltrate, operating a code of omertà. On the other hand, their identities are largely a matter of record. When your organised crime group has its own Wikipedia page? Yes, you’re lighting up the police radar. The authorities, therefore, know precisely who their targets are. The rest is a question of time, resources, political will and luck. Police officers specialising in proactive operations know all four are as rare as gold dust. And make no mistake: the Scottish Parliament will throw the kitchen sink at the gangs who so blatantly challenge their authority, even if the SNP has to grit its teeth and get support from south of the border.
Nor is needing help from Westminster very surprising. The “pointy end” of fighting organised crime can sometimes feel more like counterinsurgency than beat policing. The mantra “Clear, Hold, Build” sounds like something you might attempt in Basra or Helmand. And it’s something our establishment prefers to deny, not least as it undermines their cosy image of British policing. In this case, anyway, Police Scotland can’t handle the gang crisis alone: 100 officers is a trifling number for an operation of this scale. The NCA, and possibly the Security Service, will need to provide technical know-how and assets (like MI5 did with the Adams Family). At the less glamorous end of the business, meanwhile, local police will have to work doubly hard to develop intelligence by winning trust on the streets. This, as Scottish politicians are about to discover, illustrates the consequences of neglecting neighbourhood policing, which has suffered swingeing cuts from Taunton to Aberdeen.
A three-ring circus of law enforcement will therefore be pitching up in Scotland, with its attendant politics, agendas and egos. Can its thoroughly modern methods, reliant on theoretical models, proportionality, human rights and technology, defeat such a tried-and-tested enemy? In Glasgow and Edinburgh, the Wicker Man burns. Let’s hope the officers sent to extinguish it have more luck than Edward Woodward.
