SUMMER recess is always one of the best times of the year for MPs and not just because you don’t have to deal with Westminster. Mainly it’s because you get to see the amazing work that so many of our local organisations do with their summer galas and the holiday programmes.

I have thoroughly enjoyed being able to visit many of these events as it is a welcome tonic to the toxicity of Westminster and the constant talking down of the city I represent – Glasgow – that you see in the local press, mainly by Labour politicians.

The holiday programme the SNP Glasgow City Council administration introduced has been one of the best initiatives the city has seen in years, and that’s not just my opinion – it is what community organisations across my constituency have told me.

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What sets this apart from things we have seen before is that it isn’t the council turning up for a few weeks in the summer and running identical programmes in each area – local organisations with local knowledge are being empowered to do it themselves.

In Glasgow, we are blessed with a richness of community and youth groups which know their areas and their people better than any council or government department ever could, so funding them to continue their work through the summer is a no-brainer.

This is a total change from the paternalistic and centralising approach of previous Labour councils and that trust and partnership working with communities is not only better appreciated but it leads to much better results as well.

Politics, locally and nationally, should be about doing things with people rather than to them. We have seen the consequences of a lack of resilience in communities when the shock of the financial crisis resulted in far less money being spent by public bodies and as services were cut communities went without.

The less reliant any group or community is on one source of funding or one service provider, the more able they are to weather the next storm.

The Community Empowerment Act was one of the ways in which the Scottish Government wanted to address the problem of people and communities feeling disconnected from decision-making and not having a stake in the areas they live.

The National: POTD.I was walking up Virginia Street in Glasgow and I was amazed at the view up the street and how preserved this area is in terms of the old buildings. However rising up in the distance is the People Make Glasgow logo on the City of Glasgow College. Thi

The People Make Glasgow Communities programme has been how Glasgow is dealing with the asset transfer aspect of this and has had some hugely successful examples already.

St Paul’s Youth Forum in Blackhill has recently taken over the Molendinar Community Centre, employing half a dozen residents, enabling a local young man to open up a gym business and putting on activities from kids’ clubs to line dancing for the people of the surrounding area.

Its leader, Neil, told me: “We couldn’t do this ourselves, Glasgow Life couldn’t do this itself, but as a partnership, we will be able to deliver more for this community than ever before.

There have been more than 600 notes of interest by groups across the city at various stages of the process but this is a far cry from the fire sale that the usual naysayers claimed.

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This is community empowerment in action – it is partnership working between politicians and community organisations to deliver better outcomes for local people, and surely that’s what it’s all about.

The incessant negativity will only increase as we get closer to a General Election. Labour will tell us that Glasgow is uniquely terrible, that the difficulties our city faces are not the consequences of the pandemic, Tory austerity and Labour’s disgraceful history of discriminating against women leaving the city with an almost £1 billion mess to clean up.

But if we look up from the faux-outrage headlines and the hyper-partisan timelines, we will see communities that are beginning to thrive once more.

Investment is getting to the right places and people and they are having their voices heard and taking part in the decisions that directly impact their lives.