JONATHAN BROCKLEBANK: You really need to wake up and smell the gunpowder, Mr Swinney - and ban the sale of fireworks

A few days ago I went outside my house to witness the terror that a fireworks mob was inflicting on my street. It felt foolhardy – downright stupid even – but I filmed them as they lobbed explosives at my neighbour's houses.

At one point a group of 10 or so of these hooded figures rushed in my direction and I feared I was about to be beaten up, but I stood my ground and they swept past me.

Indignation kept me rooted to the spot, aiming my camera at them as brazenly as they aimed pyrotechnics at the doorways of people's homes.

One of their number remarked to his mates that I was recording them. His mates carried right on with the terror.

They knew that my video evidence of their exploits wouldn't come to anything. They were right. It didn't.

That was on October 31. On November 1, I learned that, even when an army of 40 thugs invades your street and bombards households with potentially deadly missiles, it barely registers in the Police Scotland incident room.

Their description of the incident in Glasgow's Pollokshields records that, at 8.20pm, police received a report of a fireworks being set off in my street. Yes, I made the report.

It adds: 'Officers attended and there were no injuries reported. A 13-year-old was taken home and advice and guidance given.'

Nothing to see, here, folks. At most, an adolescent up to mischief. We have apprised the youth in question of the fireworks code.

When events such as this in the run up to Bonfire Night are treated so lightly, it inspires little confidence in the authorities' response to the carnage which now annually attends November 5.

Sure enough, the scenes in my area that night were horrific – worse, in fact, than most of us have ever known. They began not long after dark and continued unabated until at least 2am by which time Albert Drive, the epicentre, looked like a bomb site.

You think bonfires are the things suburban dads light in their back gardens while the kids run around with sparklers? Wake up and smell the gunpowder.

Round here they light bonfires on mini-roundabouts in the middle of the street. They use wheelie bins as accelerants for the blaze.

They throw rockets into the flames and at traffic. Parked vehicles are torched. They turn their neighbourhood into a vision of hell.

In Edinburgh they lob bottles, bricks and fireworks at emergency crews. Same thing in Dundee. Bonfire Night is riot night – same time, same places every year, regular as clockwork.

And, every year, the residents of these blighted communities are left wondering if they live on the same planet as those who equivocate about the scale of the problem.

First Minister John Swinney tells us he has taken 'encouragement' from the fact there was a lower incidence of disorder this year than last year.

Seriously, Mr Swinney? Homes were under siege; people were too terrified to go out. The streets were given over to lawless mobs, smashing car windscreens and trashing public and private property. And you're encouraged?

And this lower incidence you speak of.

If incidents such as the one I witnessed are brushed aside as a lone 13-year-old getting a ticking off, how accurate, do you feel, is your info?

For his part, Assistant Chief Constable Tim Mairs commented that it was 'unacceptable' that people feel intimidated and threatened in their own communities.

As a member of one of those communities, I'd go further. Unacceptable is what it was 20 years or more ago when Pollokshields first emerged as a hotspot for fireworks anarchy.

Outrageous is what it is today. A complete dereliction of duty to long-suffering residents driven to distraction by thuggery.

What emerges from the tales I have heard from my own area and others is that the police seek only to contain the criminality they know will erupt every year at this time. They make no attempt to stop it.

There is no nipping it in the bud.

One resident reported that she approached police officers in a van on November 5 as they sat on watching brief while the law was flouted in front of their noses.

She asked them why they were not intervening. Because their bosses had told them not to, came the reply.

'So basically we pay our taxes and they stand back and allow grown men to wreck and terrorise our neighbourhood,' she said.

Yes, that is about the strength of it.

On a night when Scottish Fire and Rescue Service received more than 1000 calls, responded to 347 bonfires and 598 related incidents across Scotland, the police made a total of 19 arrests in connection with firework offences.

Who knows, perhaps 'advice and guidance' was given to a few others.

There are those who argue that, in the face of such a lily-livered police response, it is barely worth the trouble banning fireworks.

Indeed, I said something similar on this page a couple of months ago when Glasgow City Council proudly declared my area a 'fireworks control zone' for the first 10 days of November and wished us all a peaceful Bonfire Night.

That was before it realised it had bungled the legislative process, couldn't introduce the law in time and that people here would be subject to the familiar dismal onslaught after all.

But, if nothing else, a complete ban on the public sale of fireworks would send a message that someone, somewhere gives a damn about what residents in Scottish cities are put through year after year – not just on Bonfire Night but for weeks on either side of it.

It would acknowledge – finally – that these wretched items bring much more misery than joy and that government actually wants to help.

What grates more than anything – particularly in an era in which ministers are forever fussing in areas of our lives where they are not welcome – is the narrative that it really needn't dirty its hands with this issue, that local legislation is working.

It is patently failing. We have a police force whose non-interventionist strategy is making a mockery of the law, central government which washes its hands of the issue by telling us to speak to our councils about it and, in Glasgow, a local authority too incompetent to pass its own legislation.

We have criminal gangs selling industrial quantities of fireworks to teenagers in the full knowledge they will be used to wreak mayhem – and we have parents who, it seems, remain entirely unconcerned that their kids are out at all hours terrorising the neighbours.

Is it really too much to ask for someone to take this seriously? The evidence is overwhelming. Survey after survey reveals the vast majority of Scots want a complete ban on the sale of fireworks.

A Scottish Government consultation carried out in 2019 suggested 87 per cent of people wanted them outlawed.

Does Mr Swinney suppose that figure would be any lower today? Don't be 'encouraged', First Minister. Be outraged. Be resolute that this ends in 2024.

As for Police Scotland, well, I offered them the footage I took of my street being attacked a week ago. They haven't been back in touch.