Political discourse in contemporary Scotland increasingly revolves around the vision of a ‘New Scotland’, more prosperous and meritocratic than the rest of the United Kingdom. This has a convoluted relationship with Scotland’s industrial past, and specifically the social dislocation experienced through deindustrialisation. This article analyses the deployment of this narrative within regeneration efforts in former industrial communities in Lanarkshire and Inverclyde, West Central Scotland, before counterpoising it with the reflections of former industrial workers and their families. It does so through an analysis of monuments to the industrial past, comparing those erected as part of regeneration schemes by local authorities with community efforts to commemorate past struggles and industrial disasters. This examination is accompanied by the use of oral history narratives to argue that there are two distinct understandings of the nature of place, space, struggles over social justice and communal identities within these localities, which lean heavily on the memory of the industrial past in contrasting ways.
Renewable energy has long been central to SNP policy making and Scottish independence. During the 2014 referendum, green electricity generation was presented as a means for Scotland to achieve 'reindustrialisation'. Despite a world-leading transition in electricity supply, the Scottish government has struggled to develop renewables manufacturing. Scotland's largest offshore engineering company, BiFab, entered administration in 2020. This article explains the faltering of Scotland's green industrial revolution. First, it assesses renewables' privileged place in SNP perspectives, underlining its deep roots in North Sea oil and criticisms of British governments' mismanagement of offshore opportunities. Second, the failure of market-led policy making to provide the anticipated industrial benefits from offshore wind developments is explained through the domineering role of foreign state-owned enterprises and global supply chains in the UK's renewables sector. The conclusion argues that older nationalist perspectives offer remedies, but these require a more active industrial policy that diverges from the current approach of the Scottish Government.
This article examines conceptions of social justice and economic fairness with regard to employment. It does so through an analysis of the management of deindustrialization in the Scottish coalfields between the 1940s and 1980s. Emphasis is placed on the historical roots and social and political constitutions of labor market practices. The analysis is grounded within Karl Polanyi’s Great Transformation; industrial relations within coal mining are conceived through an ongoing conflict between commodifying, liberalizing market forces and a “counter-movement” of worker and community resistance and state regulation, which works to embed markets within social and political priorities. E. P. Thompson’s moral economy provides the basis for an understanding of the formulation of communal expectations and employment practices that acted to mitigate the disruption caused by pit closures. The analysis grounds the historical roots of the moral economy within Poalnyi’s counter-movement and illuminates the operation of specific practices of a Thompsonian character within the nationalized industry, which maintained individual and collective employment stability. This is constructed utilizing interviews with former mineworkers and members of mining families. These are supplemented by archival sources that include the minutes of Colliery Consultative Committee meetings, which took place before pit closures. They reveal the moral economy was fundamentally centered on the control of resources, collieries, and the employment they provided rather than simply elements of financial compensation for those suffering from labor market instability. Resultantly procedure centering on collective consultation was fundamental in legitimating colliery closures.
This case study of the Caterpillar earthmoving equipment factory at Uddingston in Lanarkshire from opening in 1956 to closure in 1987 contributes to debates about workforce resistance to deindustrialization by focusing on the question of ownership. The factory was the legal property of the US multinational's UK tractor manufacturing subsidiary, but this analysis demonstrates the manner in which workers and communities came to assert rights of ownership of a valued local resource. The factory, the largest single industrial unit in Scotland during the 1960s, was established with regional assistance, and built on the site of a former mining village. Workforce and community expectations of long-term employment sustainability were duly established. Policy-makers tacitly offered a viable future with more sustainable employment than coal mining. But this promise was On Wednesday 14 January 1987 local representatives of the US multinational Caterpillar announced the closure of its earthmoving equipment factory at Uddingston in Lanarkshire, transferring production to sites in Belgium and France. The plant's 1,300 workers were astonished. Although the company had recently recorded short-run financial losses, a major programme of investment at Uddingston had been agreed in September 1986, totalling £62.5 million. Associated with the introduction of a new model of bulldozer, the D6H, one-eighth of this proposed investment would come from UK government regional assistance grants. Conservative government ministers, especially Malcolm Rifkind, Secretary of State for Scotland, were embarrassed by Caterpillar's withdrawal, which exacerbated an already difficult employment situation in west central Scotland.An instant assessment in The Guardian emphasized Caterpillar's reputation as 'a brutal multinational with no interest in employees at its satellite factories' around the world, evidenced less than four years earlier when the firm had closed a plant at Birtley in Gateshead in 1983, with the loss of 1,000 jobs. The abandonment of Uddingston was yet another outrage in the flight of multinational capital from the UK since 1980. In this short period roughly one half of manufacturing capacity and employment had been lost. 1 The workers resisted at Uddingston, occupying the factory and announcing their intention 'to carry on working'. 2 This drew explicitly on the perceived success of the famous work-in at Upper Clyde Shipbuilders (UCS) in 1971-2. Foster and Woolfson, whose study of UCS had recently been published in 1987, saw three parallels between the two struggles. First, there was the 'remote' nature of industrial disinvestment, with decisions taken at geographical and political remove.Second, there was a Conservative UK government committed to the free market and so rendered powerless to protect industrial employment. Third, resistance was marshalled by far-sighted shopfloor representatives, mobilizing a broader political movement in defence of working class economic security. 3 The two campaigns had diverging outcomes, howe...
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