The shipbuilding industry, the icon of Scotland’s mighty industrial past, has been dealt a shuddering, maybe fatal, blow. Fergusons, the last commercial shipyard on the Clyde, has gone bust. Some 70 men, and a handful of women, have lost their jobs. The yard has been building ferryboats for Caledonian MacBrayne but has run out of orders. It’s a blow also to our national morale as we contemplate our future in these last few weeks before the independence referendum.
Shipbuilding is one of those industries which define a nation as heavyweight. It’s about strength, skill, masculine beauty as well as commercial success and, literally, overseas prowess. The Clyde has given us great ships, from clippers like the Cutty Sark to luxury liners like the Queen Mary and the Queen Elizabeth. More recently it’s given us useful roll-on-roll-off ferries and sophisticated Type 26 frigates and parts of the new aircraft carriers.
In their heyday, 19 Clyde shipyards employed 70,000 men. In the First World War and again the Second World War they were launching a ship a day. The bigger yards, like Fairfields, would have a dozen ships under construction at any one time. The yards also produced men of steel – hard, self-educated, working class heroes, of which the famous ones ( like Jimmy Reid, Sir Alex Ferguson and Billy Connolly ) are only the froth on top of the real ale beneath.
Of course, the Clyde was not the only place that built ships in Scotland. Robbs of Leith churned out tugs and dredgers till the Proclaimers mourned their loss in 1982. Aberdeen’s Hall Russell yard built the fishing fleet that ruled the North Sea till the 1990s. Millers of St Monans built the Fifie yachts. The Buckie shipyard serviced the RNLI’s lifeboat fleet till it closed last year and its assets were taken over by Macduff Shipyards a few miles along the coast. The Macduff yard is about the only commercial shipyard left in Scotland, employing 150 staff and building small service boats for the North Sea.
The prospect of independence has cast doubt over the future of the last substantial shipyard in Scotland, BAE Systems on the Clyde, the successor of the famous Fairfield yard. It employs 4,000 people, specialising in Navy ships – currently the Type 26 frigates. But whether the remaining UK Royal Navy would continue to place orders in a “foreign” country is a matter hotly disputed.
And here we come to the heart of the matter – money and European Union rules. Foreign yards are building ships much more cheaply than Scottish yards because of lower wages and more adventurous investors. It began with Japan, then South Korea, and now Poland. Three Caledonian MacBrayne ferries have been built in Poland in recent years. It’s not only cheaper, it’s also required under EU competition law that tenders are open to all European firms and no government can unfairly subsidise its home yards.
The question the 70 Ferguson workers are now asking us is – is this an agreeable state of affairs ? Does Britain – and would an independent Scotland – get more out of the European single market than it loses ? We are sacrificing our beloved shipbuilding industry (and all its cultural muscle) and what are we getting in return ? Unfortunately the answer is quite a lot. Cheaper ships for a start. But other Scottish firms – non-shipbuilding firms it has to be said – are winning contracts in Europe. Scottish Enterprise estimates that the European market could be worth £11 billion a year to Scottish firms in fields such as whisky, salmon and shellfish, engineering, finance and the bio-sciences.
Whether we like it or not, Scotland is no longer the workshop of the world. As The Proclaimers said, Linwood cars no more, Ravenscraig steel no more, shipbuilding no more. We can no longer make things cheaper and better than other countries. The Clydeside sculptor George Wyllie commented sourly on this when he hung a straw locomotive from the Finnieston crane and floated a paper boat on the Clyde.
The challenge for us now is to create muscular jobs in the new industries of alternative energy, bio-chemistry, re-cycling, quality food and drink, education, sport and the arts. And maybe cut out for ourselves a specialised market in up-dated Fifie yachts.
