Conclusion:
the meaning and memory of deindustrialization

On 26 July 2019, workers left the Caledonian railway works in Springburn, Glasgow, for the last time. Over 200 jobs were lost as the yard shut its doors after the German owners deemed the site surplus to requirement, ending over 160 years of railway engineering. Following a ceremony to mark the departure of the works’ final production – a refurbished train – the workforce marched out together. They were led by a piper, and accompanied by industrial chaplains, trade union officials and local politicians. After the procession was cheered by residents of adjacent housing schemes, the union convenor, Les Ashton, delivered a speech. Ashton underlined that employment at ‘the Caley’ had been inherited by the present workers from their forebearers. He rejected the notion that jobs at the railway works were the property of the current workforce which could be legitimately traded for redundancy payments. They were custodians who wished to pass on employment at the works to a further rising cohort of future employees.¹

The closure in Springburn marked another departure of (in this case much modernized) infrastructure with origins in the coal and steam era from Scotland’s landscape. Ashton’s collectivist sense of intergenerational solidarity clearly resonated with the coalfield moral economy. During an interview conducted in 2014, the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) Scotland president, Nicky Wilson, angrily recalled the National Coal Board’s (NCB’s) conduct during contentious closures in the 1980s. Board officials enticed men ‘tae sell their jobs’ through the offer of large redundancy packages and enhanced pension benefits.² These attempts to undermine workforce solidarity were a double transgression of the moral economy’s foundation in an understanding of colliery employment as a community resource, and an attack upon the trade union representation through which it was mediated. In a thoughtful reflection on the great strike for jobs as it concluded, Michael Jacobs had recognized twenty-nine years previously that one of its remarkable features was the basis upon which it was fought. Striking miners were primarily motivated by the maintenance of the industry and passing jobs on to their descendants.³

The ceremonial nature of the last day of work at the Caledonian works demonstrates continuity in the politics of deindustrialization across late twentieth-and early twenty-first-century Scotland. Scott McCallum recollected that ‘there were quite a few tears shed’ when the Cardowan colliery chimney was demolished after the pit’s closure in 1983. This was a community occasion, with Scott and other schoolmates from mining households attending.⁴ There was a cathartic dimension to the ‘ritualistic’ practices enacted at the Caley and Cardowan.⁵ These developments strongly evidence the refusal of industrial workers to be rendered ‘invisible’.⁶ One effect of deindustrialization is to cast remaining industrial workers as anachronistic historical leftovers. Just as workers resisted industrialization by mobilizing their traditions of craft customs, responses to the long experience of deindustrialization are characterized by recourse to the collectivist culture of industrial workplaces. While E. P. Thompson memorably insisted that the industrial working class was ‘present at its own making’, episodes of deindustrialization reveal that it is also present at its own unmaking.⁷ When the last train left the Caledonian works, it was workers and their union officials who marked the occasion, while management were conspicuous by their absence. The construction of a memorial for the Auchengeich disaster by striking miners in 1984 (discussed in chapter three) is another example of the impulse to collectively mark industrial heritage when its future is threatened.

A larger array of industrial monuments now populates the Scottish coalfields. Memorials erected as a result of community campaigns tend towards the commemorations of specific events, while industrial monuments built as part of commercial regeneration efforts often provide a more generic tribute to the industrial era.⁸ These distinctions underline that deindustrialization is a temporal challenge to historians. It requires analysis of a longue durée structural change that evolved over more than half a century, without losing empathy for the strongly ingrained cultural practices that instilled industrial activities with a sense of durability. Coalfields are in some senses an extreme example given the tendency for paternal inheritance of occupational identities and the trend for coal mining settlements to be strongly dependent on the industry. Generational cohorts are an effective unit of analysis which reveal how distinct formative experiences and labour market conditions shaped different political and cultural outlooks. Comparatively short and episodic events related to the socioeconomic climate and experiences of industrial relations provided important reference points that were retained across lifetimes. But successive generations were also strongly shaped by intergenerational processes of socialization. A strong sense of historical and familial attachment was formative to Scottish coalfield politics and underpinned moral economy perspectives.

Deindustrialization has been a central feature of the Scottish coalfields since the mid twentieth century. It was initially experienced through local crises, especially in the Shotts area in eastern Lanarkshire. These contested experiences of community abandonment contributed to a growing sense of nationwide coal crisis during the late 1950s and early 1960s. This developed through the onset of falling coal employment levels and the relationship between coal production and power station investment. Responses to deindustrialization were historically conditioned by the collective memory of industrialization and the political culture of the coalfields that developed through the industry’s nineteenth-century expansion and the conflicts of the interwar years. Objections to deindustrialization hinged on the juxtaposition of communitarian interest with the dictates of market logic. Michael McGahey summarized his understanding of the forces that determined colliery closure in characteristic humanist terms within the pages of Scottish Marxist during the early 1970s: ‘Inanimate matter does not compete – it is the pecuniary forces behind various fuels which are in competition’.⁹

McGahey’s emphasis on resistance to commodification of coal and coal miners’ labour exemplifies the conflict between market logic and a protective countermovement that shaped the double movement of deindustrialization in postwar Scotland. While McGahey was writing in the pages of a Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) journal on this occasion, the NUM Scottish Area (NUMSA) leadership was able to speak for a broad coalition when it articulated moral economy sensibilities. This reflected their foundations in historical experience. Within the testimonies collected for this book, former miners with anti-communist views and former colliery managerial staff concurred with the perspective of communists over the nationalized industry’s obligations towards coalfield communities. These perspectives were often rooted in an understanding of the abuses committed under private ownership. The moral economy centred on a view that collieries and the employment they sustained were a collective resource. Those inclinations are far from uniquely Scottish and follow an international pattern. When Scottish miners commenced stay-down strikes to oppose colliery closures at Devon, Alloa, in 1959 and at Kinneil, West Lothian, during 1982 they deployed similar protest repertoires to those used in South Wales in the 1930s and in Occitanie, western France, during the 1960s.¹⁰ In all of these examples, pit closures within areas marked by the long-term rundown in colliery employment were met by communal assertions of rights to economic resources. Collieries were understood as sources of wealth and nourishment which had been paid for at a high cost of deaths and injuries.

Although these commonalities are important in theorizing deindustrialization, this volume has also analysed the importance of historically specific societal and political contexts. The translation of localized developments onto a national plain, and the form of politicization that deindustrialization provokes, can both be relatively malleable. As prolonged contraction hit the Scottish coalfields, responses to closure became enmeshed with views of Scotland’s distinct interests within the Union and debates over the constitution. Through the relatively decentralized NCB before 1967, the Scottish Office, and the South of Scotland Electricity Board, as well as the institutional voices of labour and business, the Scottish Trades Union Congress and Scottish Council (Development and Industry), there were significant devolved dimensions to these deliberations. One major outcome of accelerated coalfield contraction under an increasingly centralized NCB during the 1960s was that the NUMSA’s support for home rule became more pronounced.

As events in Springburn demonstrated, deindustrialization continues to be mediated by national framings. During the 2010s, Scottish workers continued articulating their interests in a moral economy language directed at policymakers and governments in Edinburgh and London. The same week as the workers left the Caley for the last time, an argument about the (mis)use of natural resources brewed elsewhere within Scottish industry on terms which were strongly redolent of the coalfield moral economy. Pat Rafferty and Gary Smith, Scottish secretaries of the Unite and GMB unions respectively, denounced the ‘paltry return’ of only eight jacket sleeves awarded to the BiFab fabrication yards from the large Neart Na Gaoithe offshore wind development ten miles from the Fife coast. BiFab’s largest yard in Methil, eastern Fife, sits atop the former site of Wellesley colliery that closed in 1967. The area has experienced considerable job losses in mining, manufacturing, shipbuilding and dock work in recent decades.¹¹

The logic deployed by Rafferty and Smith has strong parallels with arguments made for power station investment at Longannet analysed in chapter one. The building of Longannet and the drift mines which supply it secured work for Fife miners half a century ago, persisting into the early twenty first century. During the 1960s, coal’s competitors were alternative fuel sources including imported oil. In the context of renewables, it is Scotland’s place in multinational supply chains which is the height of controversy. However, in each case, workers, communities and trade union representatives have argued for the exploitation of natural resources in a manner which develops local employment and economic security. Alongside the importance of national sovereignty over resource deposits, labour movement arguments have also rested on the central role of public investment. This was embodied by the nationalized coal industry and power generators during the 1960s, and by the occupiers of Caterpillar’s factory in Tannochside in 1987 who stated that closure was an injustice in the context of the regional assistance payments that their plant had received. Contemporary arguments for economic justice in renewables manufacturing relate to the significant public subsidies provided for renewables as well as the Scottish Government support given to BiFab’s Canadian owners.¹² The reference points of coal miners therefore remain highly relevant to discussion over the meaning of an environmentally and socially ‘just transition’.¹³

A sense of finality is key to explaining the sense of loss associated with coalfield deindustrialization. Narratives are strongly conditioned by the way in which colliery closures were managed and the economic cost to workers and communities. The less tangible cultural cost of removal from heritage and a strongly invested occupational identity also strongly colours accounts of closure and job loss. Mick McGahey’s testimony was characterized by a strong familial embeddedness in the industry. Mick recalled his grandfather taking him for walks in Lanarkshire when he was a young boy and telling him about collieries that he had worked in with Mick’s father.¹⁴ Miners’ sense of a lost occupational working culture is often accompanied by an understanding of the role their industry played in transforming Scotland, Britain and the international economy. Sam Purdie underlined miners’ contribution by recalling the industrial innovations that had been pioneered in the area surrounding the now depopulated mining village of Glenbuck in Ayrshire where he grew up:

Sam’s rhetorical framing, listing the miners’ contribution after innovative industrialists and their endeavours, indicates their central importance, but also underlines a fear of being forgotten along with Glenbuck itself. These comments underline the importance of esteem and the continuity of a struggle for recognition which is central to coalfield politics, history and memory.¹⁶ Drawing a balance sheet of this nature necessarily entails a form of critical nostalgia that can both identify the real losses associated with deindustrialization but also critique the past and right historical wrongs. Alongside noting coal miners’ achievements in industrial, social and democratic advancement, the testimonies underlined the dangers of the industry and ambivalence towards its health effects, as well as painful memories of victimization and displacement. Narratives of loss and removal are given further prescience by the sense of continuing injustices associated with colliery closures. Scottish coalfield history shares an affinity with American miners for whom ‘memory, is indeed the final site of conflict’.¹⁷

During 2018, the Scottish Government began a review into the policing of the 1984–5 miners’ strike.¹⁸ This undertaking was the outcome of a decades-long campaign fought by victimized miners after the strike concluded in March 1985.¹⁹ The review included a series of evidence-gathering meetings in coalfield locations which were attended by local miners. At these meetings, witnesses recalled individual and collective abuses including unjust arrests and the targeted victimization and sacking of union activists. These memories were accompanied by reflections on the purpose of the government’s prosecution of the strike which was rationalized in terms of the disposal of viable economic assets and the undermining of the trade union voice. The Lanarkshire meeting was held at the Auchengeich Miners’ Club on 6 December 2018. Several former strikers gave evidence relating to experiences of policing during the strike and underlined the social and economic costs incurred by victimized men in navigating an increasingly adverse labour market after the dispute’s conclusion.²⁰

A devolved Scottish government reviewing the injustices associated with coal industry conflicts can be understood as a success for the politics which developed through the long experience of deindustrialization. In an emotional tribute to Michael McGahey, written in 2002, John McAllion, who was then the Labour MSP for Dundee East, attributed the achievement of a Scottish parliament in no small part to his efforts.²¹ As this volume has demonstrated, McGahey’s contribution was highly significant. However, the expression of Scottish national discontent with deindustrialization – and the resultant emboldening of commitments to Scottish political autonomy – originated under an earlier generation of communist miners’ leaders. Politics in Scotland under devolution bares the mark of these origins. This was personified by Nicola Sturgeon’s response to the death of Margaret Thatcher in 2013. The deputy first minister at the time recalled, ‘The brutal deindustrialization she presided over, and the unemployment that resulted, [which] has left deep scars in every community in this city [Glasgow] and across Scotland’.²² Interpretations of deindustrialization and coalfield politics in Scotland are not homogeneous. Politically influential accounts have tended towards an understanding of accelerated closures and falling industrial employment as ‘an external attack’ imposed on Scotland from London, ignoring dynamics of class conflict within Scotland itself. However, the influence of the moral economy’s stress on government responsibility towards communities is also evident. This has played a crucial role in shaping a ‘social justice’ discourse of collective partnership and a shared national interest which predominates in contemporary Scottish politics.²³

Experiences of job losses in Springburn and precariousness in Methil demonstrate that deindustrialization is not confined to the past. The dynamics of the double movement continue to unfold in Scotland. Renewing industrial employment and embedding production within communitarian concerns has been given heightened importance by the context of climate change and the urgent necessity behind another major transition in energy generation. In this context, political outlooks grounded in the sensibilities of industrial society remain central. Conceptions of justice which understand natural resources and employment as community resources imbued with significance for national sovereignty continue to generate resistance to the logic of capital accumulation. Deindustrialization is a long process, with profound impacts that span across generations. Cultural associations with origins in coal mining, including familial and local identities and the memorialization and commemoration of industrial history, remain present across much of central Scotland. Less overt but nevertheless profound implications of industrialization in patterns of settlement also reverberate, including in the marked socioeconomic disadvantages and health inequalities experienced within deindustrialized areas.²⁴ The legacy of employment in Scotland’s coalfields, and the memories of the closure of collieries, steel mills and factories are formative to the political and economic situation in the 2020s.

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¹ E. Gibbs, ‘The “Caley” and Scotland’s “invisible” workers’, Conter, 26 July 2019 <https://www.conter.co.uk/blog/2019/7/26/the-caley-and-scotlands-invisible-workers> [accessed 23 Dec. 2019].

² Nicky Wilson, interview with author, John Macintyre Building University of Glasgow, 10 Feb. 2014.

³ M. Jacobs, ‘End of the coal strike’, Economic and Political Weekly, xx (1985), 443–4.

⁴ Scott McCallum, interview with author, The Counting House, Dundee, 22 Feb. 2014.

⁵ S. High and D. Lewis, Corporate Wasteland: the Legacy and Memory of Deindustrialization (New York, 2009), pp. 9–11.

⁶ J. Clarke, ‘Closing Moulinex: thoughts on the visibility and invisibility of industrial labour in contemporary France’, Modern and Contemporary France, xix (2011), 443–58, at p. 444.

⁷ T. Strangleman, ‘Deindustrialisation and the historical sociological imagination: making sense of work and industrial change’, Sociology, li (2017), 466–82, at p. 466; E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Middlesex, 1968) p. 9.

⁸ A. Clark and E. Gibbs, ‘Voices of social dislocation, lost work and economic restructuring: narratives from marginalised localities in the ‘new Scotland’, Memory Studies, xiii (2020), 39–59.

⁹ M. McGahey, ‘The coal industry and the miners’, Scottish Marxist, i (1972), 16–19, at p. 16.

¹⁰ D. Reid, The Miners of Decazeville: a Genealogy of Deindustrialization (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), p. 204; J. Jenkins, ‘Hands not wanted: closure, and the moral economy of protest, Treorchy, South Wales’, Historical Studies in Industrial Relations, xxxviii (2017), 1–36, at pp. 3–7.

¹¹ B. Wray, ‘“A paltry return”: unions criticise reported 200 NnG manufacturing jobs for BiFab’, Common Space, 24 July 2019 <https://www.commonspace.scot/articles/14522/paltry-return-unions-criticise-reported-200-nng-manufacturing-jobs-bifab> [accessed 23 Dec. 2019].

¹² Wray, ‘“A paltry return”’.

¹³ Petrocultures Research Group, After Oil (2016) <http://afteroil.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/AfterOil_fulldocument.pdf> [accessed 23 Dec, 2019].

¹⁴ Mick McGahey, interview with author, Royal Edinburgh Hospital, 31 March 2014.

¹⁵ Sam Purdie, interview with author, UWS Hamilton campus, 3 May 2018.

¹⁶ A. Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: the Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), p. 113.

¹⁷ A. Portelli, They Say in Harlan County: an Oral History (Oxford 2010), p. 192.

¹⁸ ‘Policing during miners’ strike: independent review’, Scottish Government (2018) <https://www.gov.scot/groups/independent-review-policing-miners-strike/> [accessed Dec. 2019].

¹⁹ S. McGrail and V. Paterson, Cowie Miners, Polmaise Colliery and the 1984–85 Miners’ Strike (Glasgow, 2017).

²⁰ Observation notes from meeting at Auchengeich Miners’ Club, 6 Dec. 2018; J. Phillips ‘Containing, isolating and defeating the miners: the UK cabinet ministerial group on coal and the three phases of the 1984–85 strike’, Historical Studies in Industrial Relations, xxxv (2014), 117–41.

²¹ J. McAllion, ‘Rose like a lion’, Scottish Review (2002) <http://www.scottishreview.net/JohnMcAllion422a.html> [accessed 23 Dec. 2019].

²² ‘Thatcher remembered: the Scottish Nationalist, Nicola Sturgeon’, STV (2013) <http://stv.tv/news/west-central/221629-margaret-thatcher-remembered-by-nicola-sturgeon-msp-for-political-division/> [accessed 23 Dec. 2019].

²³ J. Phillips, ‘Contested memories: the Scottish parliament and the 1984–5 miners’ strike’, Scottish Affairs, xxvi (2015), 187–206 ; E. Gibbs, ‘“Civic Scotland” versus communities on Clydeside: poll tax non-payment, c. 1987–1990’, Scottish Labour History, xlix (2014), 86–106.

²⁴ C. Beatty, S. Fothergill and T. Gore, The State of the Coalfields 2019: Economic and Social Conditions in the Former Coalfields of England, Scotland and Wales (Sheffield, 2019), pp. 5–7.