Artist gets £15,000 of public funds to live in Glasgow and eat chips

The Glasgow Effect is a term given by epidemiologists and sociologists to describe the disproportionate levels of ill health and early death in Scotland’s second city. Disproportionate, because even when the usual factors of poverty are accounted for, Glasgow exceeds expectation. People in Glasgow have the lowest life expectancy in Scotland but even the wretched figures given for the city as a whole mask appalling local discrepancies.

In 2008, a study for the Centre for Social Justice found that a white male in the Calton area of the city could expect to live until the age of 54, some twenty seven years less than his Bearsden counterpart. You have to scroll a long way down the list of global life expectancy, past Libya and the Congo, past the West Bank, Iraq and Burundi, before you find countries where a man will probably be dead by 54. In fact, there are, as of 2015, only 12 countries in the world with a lower life expectancy than that of the white male in Calton.