Road To Referendum by Macwhirter Iain

Author:Macwhirter, Iain
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cargo Publishing (UK) Ltd
Published: 2013-06-02T00:00:00+00:00

WHERE DID MY JOB GO?

While Scottish Nationalism became a joke, the continuing industrial closures were anything but. The Singer Sewing Machine factory at Clydebank closed in June 1980. This brought an end to a century of sewing machine production in a plant which at its height had employed 16,000 people. In the same year, the Corpach Pulp Mill closed in Loch Linnhe. Half a century of tyre production at Dunlop’s plant at Inchinnan ended with closure in 1981 with the loss of 2,000 jobs. Then it was 1,500 at Massey Ferguson at Kilmarnock; 13,000 at Coats Patons; 9,000 jobs disappeared at Peugeot Talbot car plant at Linwood. Burroughs Computers, Hoover, British Leyland all followed. It was as if a decision had been taken to wipe industrial Scotland off the map. Scottish Tory grandees like the Scottish Secretary, George Younger, did their best in Cabinet to protect Scotland from the worst of Thatcher’s economic policies, and repeatedly saved the Ravenscraig steel plant in Motherwell, which had become an industrial totem in Scotland. But the economic scorched-earth policies continued.

I had somehow been kept on at the BBC despite my indifferent performance in the Referendum Unit, and moved on to presenting half-hour television documentaries for the Current Account series. In the early 1980s, these programmes charted the end of Scotland as a manufacturing nation. This was one of the most traumatic periods in Scotland’s history, an industrial revolution in reverse, the effects of which are still being felt today, not least in the appalling health statistics of west central Scotland. If the 1960s saw the end of the British Empire and the Kirk, the 1980s drew a line under Scotland’s industrial history. It was as if the supports of the Union were being kicked away one by one.

In some respects the recessions of the early 1980s were more devastating to the communities affected than war, which at least had the consolation of solidarity in the face of a common enemy. Between 1979 and 1981 alone, 11% of Scottish manufacturing jobs disappeared. Scottish manufacturing lost 31% of its capacity by 1987 as a result of the Thatcher industrial recessions, and much of what was left was sold off to foreign buyers. The Scottish economy recovered marginally in the 1990s thanks to the influx of electronics companies, attracted by government incentives and access to the EU. By 1993, Scotland was producing 10% of the world’s PCs. But critics warned that this was transitory investment, a “branch plant syndrome”.

Hugh Aitken, the chief executive of the Scottish operation of computer company Sun Microsystems, famously described Silicon Glen as a “screw-driver shop”, providing essentially blue-collar jobs. Since 1997, Scottish manufacturing industry has lost 100,000 jobs, replaced by low-paid service occupations and public sector employment. Of the 200,000 jobs created in Scotland between 1995 and 2008, 85% were in three sectors: health and social work; education and administration; and defence and social security.67 Between 1951 and 2001, Scotland lost 70% of its manufacturing employment, most of it in the 1980s.

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