The end of BiFab feels like the return of Thatcher. A flashback to a darker time when the very breath of Scotland’s beating industrial body was choked out of us. Factory closure followed factory closure and the sheer weight of industrial collapse crushed all opposition. Back then it was the free market, now it’s the Green movement. Pious principle may have replaced price as the catalyst for change but the impact on working-class communities is the same.
As Fifers have discovered, the global green marketplace is no friendlier to the worker than the carbon economy before. At least when the mining industry expired and power privatisation arrived, severance payments were made with pensions topped up. I suspect that many of the modern redundancy terms would’ve made even Maggie blush.
Where are the pay-packets coming from for the new electric cars, replacement gas boilers and soaring electricity costs? We can’t all work as Green lobbyists or government bureaucrats. A golden Saudi Arabian dawn of wind energy was promised but all the Fife workers tasted was sand kicked in their faces.
It’s no better across the river Forth in East Lothian, where this Green reign of terror will deliver three monster substations to connect the wind farms to the grid. Rendering once productive land useless and threatening the last great hope of a modern Cruise/Ferry terminal.
The blind faith race to wind power has no pause for thought as it transforms Scotland into one giant pin cushion. However, more than a voodoo doll is needed to ward off a dramatic fall in sustainable base load: just one long cold windless winter will bring this country to its knees.
A reboot of our thinking on clean/reliable/safe electricity production would lead logically to the commissioning of both Torness B and Hunterston C. An industrial strategy, if we had one, would identify nuclear power as the forgotten means to securing high-tech Scottish jobs and apprenticeships in the future.
Calum Miller
Polwarth Terrace, Prestonpans
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