Dark day looms for SNP if Falkirk is added to The Proclaimers anthem for broken towns

AS FIRST Minister, Nicola Sturgeon liked to tell the story of how The Proclaimers’ song Letter From America helped sharpen her anger and shape her political beliefs. The song is a lament to all the livelihoods lost to the Highland Clearances and Margaret Thatcher’s programme of deindustrialisation. “Bathgate no more, Linwood no more, Methil no more, Irvine no more,” the brothers intone, marking the demise of collieries and car factories and fabrication yards. Irvine was where Sturgeon grew up. She witnessed its degeneration, and she came to believe that only the SNP and independence could restore the country’s position as a manufacturing powerhouse.This post-industrial decline turned much of central Scotland into the equivalent of the US rust belt: an urban fallout zone, blighted by generations-deep unemployment and heroin, which seeped into the cracks created by economic upheaval. Sturgeon’s own experience, which chimed with others’, coincided with a gradual shift within the party, towards the left and from rural to metropolitan. It also instilled a conviction that workers must never again be abandoned to their fate. As awareness of the impact of climate change grew, it was clear Scotland was going to have to distance itself from the black, black oil: the totem in which so much political faith had been invested. But this time round, the SNP assured us, there would be “a just transition”, with jobs lost in fossil fuels matched by jobs created in renewables, and support for retraining.How hollow that pledge must feel in Falkirk today, as the town and its surrounds face up to a double whammy of closures: first the Grangemouth refinery, which stopped processing crude oil in April, and now, if no-one steps in, bus manufacturer Alexander Dennis. The company, which is threatening to move its Larbert and Falkirk factories to Scarborough, employs 400 people across the two sites, while 450 are being made redundant at Grangemouth. But many more livelihoods are linked to their supply chains, or dependent on their workers having money to spend. The impact of big closures ripples out through communities, and filters down the generations.SNP evasionHow galling, too, to watch the Scottish Government try to exculpate itself from blame. In its efforts to evade responsibility, it has exposed how little it has done to support the beleaguered labour forces. When Westminster pushed through emergency legislation to prevent Scunthorpe steelworks from closing, John Swinney called for the same quasi-nationalisation for Grangemouth. But his remarks were countered by owner Petroineos, which said: “If governments had wanted to seriously consider different ownership models, the time to start that work was five years ago when we first alerted them to the challenges at the refinery.” This was nothing compared to the humiliation meted out by Manchester mayor Andy Burnham when he revealed his city had bought four times more Alexander Dennis buses than the Scottish Government. Burnham’s flaunting of his Wee Bee electric fleet, which Alexander Dennis helped to create, was particularly embarrassing, given the poor state of our own public transport network, and the fact Burnham’s drive towards creating the UK’s first fully electric, zero-emission, integrated public transport system by 2030 feels like a model for what a “just transition” should look like. Not a realitySCOTLAND, and particularly Glasgow, has been fantasising about the creation of a similar network for years, but it has not yet managed to translate it into reality. Further reddening Scottish Government faces was the revelation that 208 orders from the Scottish Zero Emission Bus Challenge Fund – set up to accelerate the transition to zero-emission buses – had gone elsewhere, including China. This must have hit Alexander Dennis hard given one of the challenges it says it faces is “strong competition from Chinese electric bus manufacturers whose share of the market [has] risen from 10% to 35%”.Grangemouth and Alexander Dennis have much in common.They both have foreign owners: PetroChina had a 50% stake in the oil refinery, while Alexander Dennis was bought over by Canadian company NFI Group Inc in 2019. This means decisions about their future were/are being made outside Scotland, with the UK and Scottish governments left scrabbling about trying in some way to respond. “I think if we are going to allow these sectors to be run in this way, it ought to be with much more dialogue and agreement,” Dr Ewan Gibbs, senior lecturer in economic and social history at Glasgow University, told me. “If we think these sectors and these workforces are so important we should be devising longer-term forms of planning.”Climate change made the demise of Grangemouth oil refinery all but inevitable. In this case, it is the failure to prepare that shocks. Project WillowTHE much-vaunted Project Willow – a £1.5 million feasibility study funded by the UK and Scottish governments – is less a plan than a menu of potential low-carbon opportunities such as hydrogen production and plastics recycling. Its belated delivery rendered one of its options – the production of sustainable aviation fuel – nigh-on impossible because the processes necessary for it to be carried out had already stopped and it would be very expensive to restart them. To create the mooted 800 jobs forecast would require £3.5 billion of investment. The £200m the UK Government has offered to support it will only be released if and when a suitable investor comes forward. None of this is of any use to those who are losing their jobs.If Grangemouth oil refinery represented the past, Alexander Dennis – with its electric buses – is a symbol of the future, a vital spark in our supposed green revolution, ripe for nationalisation. It could be that, having burned its fingers (and squandered £200m) on the disastrous nationalisation of Ferguson’s shipyard, and the ferries scandal that followed, the government is wary about acquiring another struggling company. But you have to ask: if it’s not prepared to step in and rescue a proven enterprise like this bus manufacturer, will it ever be prepared to intervene again? It must do something, though, because there’s so much at stake and the losses feed into a larger picture. According to the census, there are 100,000 fewer people working in manufacturing in Scotland now than there were at the start of the 21st century. Deindustrialisation isn’t something that happened in the late 1980s/early 1990s and then stopped, but part of a depressing pan-Scotland continuum. As for Falkirk itself, we know what happens to places which experience job losses on a mass scale. Their shops close, they lose their sense of identity, crime rises, drug use rises, life expectancy drops. It’s a decline that has its own momentum, difficult to stop once it has started.‘Scunnered-ness’SOMETHING else we know: that decline breeds a certain kind of scunnered-ness. Voters in places which have lost their main sources of income look at how little the established parties have done to help them and want to crush them. It is those communities, where poverty is rife and employment a distant memory, that are most vulnerable to populism, to parties promising to better the lives of ordinary working-class people. Once – and with much better intentions – that was the SNP. Now it is Reform. We are already seeing it capitalise on misery across the country.It is in the SNP’s interests, then, to make sure solutions to Grangemouth and Alexander Dennis are found: for the communities involved, for the planet, and for its own political survival. It would be a grim irony, if, almost 40 years after The Proclaimers’ album came out – and on the SNP’s watch – Falkirk had to be added to the litany of loss.

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