GMB: We must let Scotland make again

By Louise Gilmour, GMB Scotland secretary

Forget jute, jam, and journalism, for the next three days, Dundee is all about jobs, jobs, and jobs.

The STUC Congress is in town and campaign trails will be detouring to Tayside so party leaders can assure the unions - and voters - of their commitment to the working people of Scotland.

Terrific, but forgive us if the bunting stays in the box for now. Unless our aspiring first ministers are on the road to Dundee with a detailed plan for jobs in their pocket instead of a half bag of promises, they should save their petrol.

This election will be won or lost on many issues but few are more important than electing a Scottish Government with the ambition, drive and capability to create well-paid work and the trained, skilled workforce that goes with it.

Those jobs are what good lives are built on. Those skills are what strong families and proud communities are built on. Without them, our country stands on sand.

Why then have we spent decades offshoring contracts and jobs while allowing our industrial muscle to atrophy? For too long, our country’s busiest production line has been churning out government press releases promising jobs tomorrow while our engineering yards and factories, manufacturing plants and welding shops, produce only tumbleweed today.

Despite being told of its imminent arrival for years now, we have yet to see an industrial strategy for Scotland fit for publication never mind purpose.

Meanwhile, as The Record revealed, tugs supporting our Royal Navy nuclear submarines at Faslane will be built on the other side of the world despite publicly-owned Ferguson Marine, the last commercial shipyard on the Clyde, looking for work just a few miles away.

Electric buses, bought by the Scottish Government to carry Scottish passengers on Scotland’s roads, are being built everywhere but here as coach makers Alexander Dennis shutters a plant in Falkirk. In Motherwell, a town once known as Steelopolis, while ministers are busy on the stump, Volvo is pressing ahead with the closure of Rokbak trucks with the loss of 120 jobs while considering switching other production lines to China.

From Ravenscraig to Grangemouth, the litany of industrial failure is relentless while, year after year, we are told by hand-wringing ministers and civil servants, on both sides of the border, that directly awarding public contracts to Scottish-based companies is all but impossible. It is, they sombrely explain, too legally risky not to offer the work to low-wage firms abroad.

So it felt significant when, last month, deputy first minister Kate Forbes – whose get up and go has now, sadly, got up and gone from Holyrood - announced the direct award of four ships to Ferguson Marine.

What? Wait a minute. Direct awards are possible after all? Who knew? Well, for a start, all the other countries refusing to tie themselves in knots over this stuff and all the other governments, who clearly believe rules around state support are more pliable than ours do.

It is national self-harm to continue awarding these contracts on price alone when the economic and social value to Scots companies, supply chains, local economies, workers, families, and communities far outweighs whatever is being saved on the bottom line.

By sending this work spinning around the world, our governments reveal they know the price of everything and the value of nothing. In a world becoming more treacherous with each week that passes, a world where we can no longer rely on old allies and former friends, we must let Scotland make again. And quickly.

From the UK Government’s imminent Defence Spending Plan to the construction of new nuclear reactors in Scotland, there are clear opportunities for political leaders, with fresh zeal and new momentum, to rebuild our industrial base, create thousands of good, unionised jobs and apprenticeships, and boost economic growth.

A few yards from the Caird Hall, in Dundee, where the STUC will meet this week, is a bigger than life-size statue of Desperate Dan, a hometown tribute to The Dandy strongman. Passing by, it is hard not to recall the famous exchange in Boys from the Blackstuff when Yosser Hughes, despairing at his failure to find work, seeks solace from his priest.

“I'm desperate Father." "Call me Dan." "I'm desperate Dan."

Well, the unions gathering on Tayside today are not desperate. We’re determined. We’re united. And we’re ready for change.

This article first appeared in The Daily Record on Monday 20 April.