When you phone Alex Salmond, you know you’ll get a decent quote. “The social housing pioneer John Wheatley would be birling in his grave,” he said. He also said the SNP were missing out on an opportunity for good PR: “neither the administration in Glasgow nor the administration in Edinburgh have their problems to seek.” Well, quite.

Mr Salmond also talked about his own experience of social housing. He grew up in a council house in the 1950s and 60s and said it was a great family home and there was no reason why it wouldn’t be around for hundreds of years to come. That first great, pre-war wave of social housing, he said, built some of the best homes in Scotland and we owe a lot of it, most of it, to John Wheatley.

Mr Salmond was also keen to remind me just how significant Wheatley was and his status as a political hero. The Labour MP’s funeral in 1930 was one of the biggest political memorials in Glasgow ever. As a minister in Ramsay MacDonald’s government, Wheatley also introduced the first social housing provision at a national level and it was this that sparked Mr Salmond’s remark about the great radical “birling in his grave”. He also said this: if Wheatley was alive today, he’d be up there at the flats himself trying to stop what’s happening.

Mr Salmond means the high flats at Wyndford in Maryhill, which have become rather famous in the last few months as a battle has emerged between the housing association – named, much to Mr Salmond’s annoyance, after Wheatley – and a group of residents calling themselves the Wyndford Residents Union. The association wants to knock the flats down and build new houses; the residents’ union wants the flats saved and refurbished instead.

Mr Salmond has now pretty heftily come down on the side of the residents and addressed them at a meeting in the local community centre on Saturday, which was why I was phoning him up. Mr Salmond’s argument is that adapting the flats would be cheaper than demolition and that the current plans are driven by a skewed funding system. “It’s all about the money,” he said, “The policy-making is orientated towards grant-funding and they’re getting tens of millions to knock the flats down.” Mr Salmond contrasted it with the treatment of the residents, who he said had been “waved away”.

What the Wheatley Group say – and I’ve spoken to them as well – is that the vast majority of tenants of the Wyndford flats are in favour of the £73m plans, but this is disputed. One of the residents told me the questionnaire that was sent round was biased towards the development and that many residents have been assumed to be supportive of the demolition because they’ve moved out, whereas it’s possible they just felt they had no choice.

The concern some of the residents have – and it’s the concern Mr Salmond has as well, and me – is that by knocking down the Wyndford flats, we’re not really learning the lessons of Glasgow’s past: the high-rises in the Gorbals for instance. There’s a fantastic film on YouTube at the moment which tells the story of the Elizabeth Square flats and it highlights how complicated buildings of this kind can be. Famously, Sir Basil Spence designed them to be “gardens in the sky” but he didn’t really reckon with Glasgow’s weather, or the neglect the flats would suffer, and eventually they were pulled down.

The question – and it still bugs me today – is whether that was the right thing to do and the BBC documentary on YouTube makes it clear the answer isn’t simple and opinions were divided at the Gorbals flats just as they are at Wyndford. Some residents found community and friendship in the Gorbals flats and liked living there; others increasingly felt isolated and even ashamed by them, but there did seem to be agreement on the fact that the flats were poorly maintained, neglected and then effectively abandoned by the council. There were issues with their design, yes, but neglect led to decay and a self-fulfilling narrative that the only solution was to blow them up.

In some ways, looking round the New Gorbals as it is today, I can see the area is better without the Elizabeth Square high-rises. I’m pretty familiar with that part of the city and large parts of it work really well: there are little parks and squares, a thriving row of shops, and, crucially, a mix in housing that was deliberately designed so that you can’t tell which is social and which is private. There’s also a real design flare to lots of the buildings in the New Gorbals so it looks good too. What’s not to like?

But the question is: what was the cost, and what will the cost be at Wyndford? Alex Salmond thinks the memory of a political hero like John Wheatley has effectively been betrayed by the association that bears his name and in a way I can see where he’s coming from: the demolition of Wyndford will lead to the elimination of hundreds of working class homes. On the other hand, the Wheatley Group tell me the homes that will replace them will be affordable, with rents starting at about £400 a month and everyone who lived in the high-rises will be offered a place.

This is all perfectly fine and I’m sure, in time, the new community will work perfectly well, but I have nagging doubts. The first is on whether the residents were properly consulted rather than presented with a fait-accompli. Mr Salmond told the meeting on Saturday (tongue a bit in his cheek) that what was needed was “independence for Maryhill”, but what he meant was that communities should have the ability to determine their own future and I agree with that.

The second nagging doubt is about whether there’s been a genuine effort to look seriously at the option of retaining the flats. One of the residents told me the buildings are physically fine and could be let out tomorrow if the will was there and there are eminent architects – Malcolm Fraser for instance – who agree with that. My fear is that the decision was made to pull them down and then evidence was gathered to justify that decision, but my hope is that the debate is far from over. As one resident put it to me: “as long as those flats are up, we have a negotiating position. As soon as they’re down, we’re screwed.”