Calton has some sympathy with beleaguered SNP Health Secretary Alex Neil, who is being lambasted on twitter for blaming Scotland's drink problems on Maggie Thatcher. There is some truth in him saying that the loss of jobs for men in traditional heavy industry left them turning to the bottle. Where Neil goes wrong, and loses Calton's sympathy, is in blaming Thatcher for a) the demise of the coal and steel industries and b) not providing decent replacement jobs. Thatcher may have hammered the last nail in the coffin of coal and steel but the corpse was already dead and embalmed - the industries were uncompetitive, uneconomical and hampered by unions like Unite who, unlike Unite, could not see the writing on the wall and adapt to save jobs. There is a limit to how far any government can go in propping up ailing industries with taxpayers' money just to keep a few people employed. Similarly, there is a limit to how much government can do to provide new jobs. How many times have sweeteners been offered to firms to locate in Scotland, only for them to pull out the minute the money runs dry or penalties no longer apply? How much public money was spent on the infrastructure for a semiconductor plant at Halbeath, Dunfermline which never opened and has now been demolished? We need to create an attractive tax and infrastructure environment for businesses to operate in Scotland, yes, but sweeteners are bad for Scotland's economic health.
Alex Neil is also in trouble for saying that checkout jobs in shops or working for McDonald's are not "good jobs". Well it depends on how you define a "good job". Working at a supermarket checkout is better than being unemployed but it will never make you rich. It might not even pay the bills, given that some retailers do not offer staff full-time contracts. McDonald's does have training schemes which could lead to a better job however many of the chain's UK workers are on zero-hours contracts. Perhaps Neil could have phrased his comment somewhat better but, the truth is, if you want to have any hope of achieving at least the national average wage of £25k and have some prospect of advancement, you do generally need to have "training, education and a qualification" as Neil said, otherwise a McJob may be all that is open to you.
Sunday 2 February 2014
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After the miners' strike, the coal industry reorganised and was turning out much the same amount of coal as before with one third of the labour force - certainly the most efficient mining industry in Europe. It was actually Heseltine who went round closing the pits. I remember feeling quite disgusted at his obvious relish. The business of supposed climate change was having an effect even then
ReplyDeleteHarold MacMillan thought that the country was "ungovernable" in the early Sixties and thought to tame the unions by unrestricted competition from Europe. He simply daren't try to abolish the legal immunities which gave them there power. If he had done so, industry would not have got to the rundown state which Thatcher inherited. Labour could not fix the problem either. The unions simply would not have Barbara Castle's "In Place of Strife" . So things ran down and down until little industry was saveable. And, of course, we now know from soviet records that some of the union barons were, at the least, Soviet agents of influence .