There’s much talk among the political parties of “re-industrialisation”. But I’m still trying to figure out what they mean. Is it a dream of “making Scotland great again”? Is it returning to the days of car factories and ship-building yards and engineering works producing the great engines of industrial revolution. It’s certainly the impression politicians give as they strut about in high-vis jacks and hard hats.
But is re-industrialisation possible, I wondered, as I walked round the old railway station at Bo’ness on the Firth-of-Forth last weekend. Steam was certainly coming from the engine as it drew several carriages of visitors, some in elegant dining cars, along the five miles of track still in use. But it was in the railway museum, with rows of mighty engines and wooden carriages, that the enormity of our industrial past really stuck me.
Bo’ness was the eastern port for the “workshop of the world.” The industrialists and workers of Central Scotland were famous for their coal mines, the Caron Iron Works, the shale-oil industry and its successor the chemical industry, engineering, car-making, salt-panning, pottery. But now they are all gone, or nearly gone, “wede awa.”
Last week we heard that the Syngenta chemical works in Grangemouth is set to close. 400 jobs may go. It follows the closure of the Ineos refinery last year where another 400 jobs were lost. The vision of re-industrialisation in Grangemouth has been slow to materialise – only 131 of the workers have found new employment and none of the UK government’s £200m transition fund as yet found a suitable project to support.
There is something wrong with the kind of re-industrialisation we are pursuing. It cannot be in manufacturing, because making “things” is no longer what life is about in Scotland. Machines and foreigners now do it cheaper. And, in any case, there is a limit to the amount of material things we need. Manufacturing is down to 12% of the Scottish economy, and only 8% of the workforce. And even then, much of that is in food and drink production not engineering.
We need a broader definition of industrialisation, one that includes the usual candidates – renewable energy, bio-science and aerospace – but also health-care, education, sport and the arts. These are the industries of the future and they have the important advantages of creating lots of satisfying jobs and having no limit to what they can produce.
They also have the advantage of creating “growth”, the Holy Grail of modern politics. Instead of pumping funds, public and private, into capital intensive projects which take years to develop, we should be investing in people. Employing people in health-care, education, sport and the arts is cheap and immediate, and their wages will create the demand the economy needs to fire-up growth.
Re-industrialisation on this scale requires confidence on the part of politicians and corporate investors. But in this age of uncertainty confidence is in short supply. We are unsettled by the troubles of our times – wars, the price of diesel, the security of our food supplies, the droughts and floods of climate change, the march of AI.
I wonder if such uncertainty was in the smoky air of the first industrialisation, here in 18th Scotland? Was it some sort of religious or cultural courage that drove those engineers on? And can we recapture that in a kinder form today?
