Meeting of the Parliament 22 February 2017
I thank Colin Beattie for lodging the motion in the Parliament, and I thank Steve Fothergill and his team at the Industrial Communities Alliance for putting together their credible, radical and compelling strategy for reindustrialisation and a rebalancing of the economy.
Steve Fothergill is a modest man, so let me say that down the years he has published groundbreaking research. Not least, he has uncovered the real rate of chronic long-term unemployment in our former industrial cities, towns and villages—the very communities that the alliance so effectively represents. I ask the cabinet secretary to go back and look at that research into the real rate of unemployment, so that instead of telling us every month how resilient the Scottish labour market is, when the Scottish claimant count and unemployment rate are announced, he asks what his Government can do to address the long-term, deep-seated but hidden unemployment that still scars many of the communities that we represent in the cross-party group on industrial communities.
If we add to the claimant and unemployment count, as we should do, the people who are listed as economically inactive but who want to work, we find that today’s real unemployment rate in Scotland is nearer to 9 or 10 per cent than it is to the 5 per cent that official figures would have us believe. Indeed, if we add those people who are working part time but could work full time, and those who are in temporary work but want permanent work, the rate is even higher.
As Steve Fothergill and his fellow researchers have shown, time after time, the profound inequalities in the real rate of unemployment—the unequal burden of unemployment between the best and worst parts of Scotland—are far greater than the official figures would lead us to believe. For example, in 2014 the team calculated that the real unemployment rate in the former coalfield communities of Fife, Ayrshire and—the area that I represent—Lanarkshire was more than 15 per cent, compared with an average real rate of just 11 per cent. If ever there was a case for a new industrial strategy, it is made by those statistics and the human stories that lie behind them.
Datasets that the Scottish Parliament information centre obtained for me recently show that in 1979, the year when Margaret Thatcher came to power, more than 600,000 people worked in manufacturing in Scotland. Today the figure is around 200,000, which is 8.6 per cent of the workforce. That is precisely why the report that we are considering argues that our economy is fundamentally unbalanced. We also know from the SPICe dataset that productivity in Scotland is below the UK average; that expenditure on R and D by businesses in Scotland is almost half the UK average; and that industrial investment in the private sector in Scotland lags behind that in the UK.
That is why it is right that Colin Beattie calls, in his motion, for “a Scottish dimension”. We need a strategy for industry in Scotland that is long term, not short term, and which includes long-term support for investment and innovation. We need a strategy that addresses the problem of Scotland having become too much of a branch-plant economy. We need a strategy that embraces democratic economic planning, so that the opportunities that are created by, for example, the Scottish Government’s goal to tackle climate change bring jobs to our local communities.
The strategy must also advance democracy and equality in the economy, so that the proper role of trade unions as representatives of workers in the economy is recognised, and so that women, who are all too often shut out of the corridors of economic power, are finally let in.
I warmly welcome the Industrial Communities Alliance’s report, which makes an important contribution to the debate. I hope that it helps the Parliament and the Government to consider how we can use the powers that we have to expand the horizons of working people in this country, and thereby bring hope back to the industrial communities that we are sent here to serve.
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