The Spanish have a proverb: God sends nuts to the toothless — in other words, in life, the wrong people keep getting the wrong stuff. In Shettleston, of course, there are many quite literal reasons to be reminded of the toothless. This corner of the Glasgow East constituency is notorious principally for deprivation and public health of a kind that sends Guardian columnists running to hide behind nanny’s skirts — male life expectancy of 63, 14 years below the British average, and shocking levels of cancer and heart disease.

On Question Time this week the panellists scraped their jaws from the floor, reeled off Shettleston’s statistics and it sounded like a suicide note. All things considered, the shortage of adequate dentition is the least of Glasgow East’s problems.

Yet nuts is what God has sent it. The recent retirement of David Marshall, the sitting Labour MP, connected ostensibly to a stress-related illness, arrived in tandem with the Crewe and Nantwich by-election loss and Labour’s rout in May’s council elections. As the camel’s back started creaking, Glasgow East began to resemble the straw.

Inadvertently, the constituency came to assume a pivotal role in the future of several shaky entities: Scottish Labour, Gordon Brown, the very concept of a safe Labour seat. Suddenly a garden-variety by-election in a constituency where the incumbent held a “forgedaboutit” majority of 14,000 had all the heft and import of a referendum.

The difference is that referendums tend to have momentum behind them — public demand has nudged and chivied them into existence. Glasgow East, though, did not ask to wield Nero’s thumb over the prime minister’s survival in the Colosseum and it doesn’t particularly care that, weirdly, it now seems able to. This is no longer the East End of John Maclean, of trades union banners and defiant proletarian solidarity.

It’s an East End deep in the post-industrial, welfare-state slough of despondency, where the incidence of unemployment touches 50% and there’s a similar proportion in social housing.

At Eusebi’s hairdressers on Shettleston Road a little notice has been stuck to the till — “No Swearing, No Bigotry” — and you can’t help wondering if it advises the customers or the staff. Otherwise, politesse is at a premium in Glasgow East. If one place reminds us that politics has become showbusiness for the unglamorous, then that place is Glasgow East. When it comes to the by-election, a kind of moral atrophy has set in — they really, really don’t care one way or another about the process.

“Politics is just never discussed in this area,” says George Lang, a hairdresser at Eusebi’s. “It doesn’t exist as a subject. In the East End, Labour are linked so strongly to the Catholic vote that you never take the risk of discussing politics if you don’t know someone’s allegiances. It just isn’t worth the risk. Why bring up a subject you don’t really care about and run the risk of flying your religious colours? It makes no sense in Shettleston.”

There’s an irony here, though. In many ways Glasgow East, and particularly Shettleston, still retains much of the one-for-all community spirit about which old Glaswegians are forever writing sentimental memoirs. The place may be out but it isn’t necessarily down.

Though hardly likely to attract the attentions of Condé Nast Traveller, it is gritting its teeth and resolutely hoping for better buoyed to some extent, if in a weary, philosophical way, by the arrival in 2014 of the Commonwealth Games. Lloyds TSB has erected a billboard on Old Shettleston Road proclaiming the financial contribution

it makes to the arts in Scotland, which is not only laudable but rather hopeful in the circumstances.

Marshall’s house looks onto a field of grazing sheep, part of the giant Tollcross Park. There are acres of new builds, their sickly yellow bricks clashing with the ancient sandstone of the tenements. Shettleston Juniors still play here and have a small but impressive stadium, though the club secretary Les — he won’t give the rest — feigns to “not give a f*** about any election, they’re all useless bastards”.

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