Picture: Penny Haywood Calder
The highlight of my week was standing on the deck of the three-masted tall-ship the Glenlee in Glasgow’s dockland. A summer sun glanced off the waters of the Clyde, turning it silver. A blue sky graced the heavens above the glass hotels, exhibition halls, office blocks, cranes, bridges and church spires. Peace, and a kind of tangled beauty, has come to this workshop of the Empire.
The Glenlee
The ship, with all its rigging, was reflected in the dark glass wall of the new Riverside Museum as if the architect, Zaha Hadid, was making a point about Glasgow enjoying the reflected glory of its past. There used to be over 30 shipyards on the Clyde. In it’s heyday a ship was launched here every day. Now there are just two yards left.
The great Clyde engineering industry, building steam locomotives, bridges, cars, sewing machines, went the same way. The sculptor George Wylie famously hung a straw locomotive from the Finnieston crane to symbolise the de-industrialisation of Scotland. Yet here, just a few years later, this riverbank is being reclaimed by the new industries…tourism, finance, call centres, entertainment, the media, education and science.
Finnieston Crane
We await to see if they can produce the long-term, worthwhile jobs – and the characters – that the engineering and shipbuilding industries produced. The men who took just six months to build this ship in 1896 were skilled and tough men, living on little more than porridge. The 25 crewmen who sailed her round the world, trading coal, wool, wheat, guano and nitrates – on voyages sometimes three years long – were no call-centre clerks. We have lost a lot of our human strength since those days.
But we live in a kinder, more equal world. We learnt this week that all 32 of Scotland’s local authorities are now paying their lowest paid workers a “living wage” of £7.45 an hour. That’s well above the legal minimum wage of £6.19 still paid by many private employers, and which, if I may say so, is the cause of much of the rising welfare bill.
And, just as there are signs of recovery on Clydeside, we had a heartening report this week from the accountancy firm Ernst and Young that foreign investment in Scotland is at a 15-year high. We managed to attract 76 major projects in 2012, from international corporations such as the pharmaceuticals company Glaxo Smith Kline, the oil giant Taqa and the computer software firm Avaloq.
The SNP government has been hailing the figures as a sign that foreign investment is not put off by all the talk of an independence referendum. The Unionists, on the other hand, say it’s a sign that the UK is working for all its nations. And the Union Jacks were further cheered by a finding from Edinburgh University researchers that only one in five teenagers are in favour of independence.
Meanwhile, the Scottish Conservatives are debating their alternative to independence…..not openly on the floor of their conference in Stirling this weekend, of course, but in the ante-chambers where such delicate discussions are better handled. Their leader Ruth Davidson is in trouble with her anxious troops for stepping over her previous “line in the sand” to suggest that the Scottish Parliament should be given more powers under the existing devolution settlement.
Glasgow School of Art
Not far away, the people of Grangemouth are wondering if the Scottish government has too much power already. They fear that a large wood-burning power station, given planning permission this week, will cause more black clouds than green clouds. It will, apparently, import most of its wood chip from America to produce 120MW of electricity and 200MW of heat for local businesses. The developers, Forth Energy, say the wood will come from sustainable forests and the heat and electricity generated will go a long way towards achieving the government’s renewable energy targets.
Finally, a word about “austerity”, the new world philosophy. An Austerity Café is opening this weekend at the Glasgow School of Art. It’s the end-of-term project of student Chris Silver who has been living on porridge “and a bit of bread” since January. He’ll be serving up his bread and porridge, dressed like a character from “Les Miserables” and suggesting we’ve havn’t come far from the days when his forefathers worked in the shipyards of Greenock building three-masted tall-ships like the Glenlee.