Saving Scotland's towns

Christopher Harvie
Our urban neutron bomb

I
My parents, in their tenth decade, live in Melrose, where I look after them; something made possible by the home care package. Melrose is what the Federation of Small Businesses in Scotland calls a 'home town' – good butchers, bakers, fish shop, greengrocery, wine merchants, ironmongers and (no coincidence) famous small hotels and restaurants. Three quarters of the shops on its high street are independent; there's good public transport and plenty of (discreet) car parking. Of how many Scots towns can this be said?
     Fewer and fewer. In the Borders, Peebles, Biggar, Lauder, Selkirk, Jedburgh, for the moment Kelso. Throughout Scotland the high street is under challenge from 'edge of town' shopping and its partner 'greenfield' housebuilding. The latter being soulless irruptions of what Iain MacWhirter called 'houses the colour of dead skin': no sign of gardens, let alone of any originality or individuality, thermally inefficient. I walked into one in the Tweed Valley at the weekend. It was closed: no sign of life, save the occasional four by four hummering past, filled up at Tesco or Asda in Galashiels.
     One or another of the Big Four will shortly take Kelso, where I went to the proto-comprehensive High School in 1956-8. It still has the character of a provincial French town. After the fall (analagous to Bomber Harris's effect on German urban life) the high street will gain mobile phone offices, charity shops, tanning and nail studios, estate agents, fast food outlets and cheapo dealers. Rest and Recreation (fortified with cheap supermarket booze) will bring their pals Accident and Emergency. Local commerce and its didactic side – lawyers and accountants, hauliers, wholesalers, agents, as well as artisan shops and their apprentices, and B and Bs for commercial visitors – will close down or move out.

II
One shouldn't over-romanticise. Some small Scots towns were boozed-up horrors in Victorian times. Think of George Douglas Brown's Barbie in his 'House with the Green Shutters': its grim, self-destructive haulier John Gourlay and the venomous 'bodies' who lay him and his family low. Mass shopping came in Liptons and with the Co-op, the carcases of whose huge stores can still be seen throughout the old coalfields: though its small-scale survival has helped many a home town. Our own Derek Cooper created Sid Gunge for his Bad Food Guide 43 years ago.
     New Labour Britain – unlike much of Europe – has gone for US-style hyper-retailing: advancing from extinguishing the 'home town' to sanctioning the swallowing of malls by megamalls. Gordon Brown still praises the wonderful productivity of the USA: in fact much of it stems from the above 'Walmartyrdom'. Last week Suave Dave arrived from Planet Cameron wanting Scotland 'run like Tesco'. Its finance arm is geared up and ready to move into the vacuum left by the suicide of RBS and HBOS. Its club-card intelligence on its customer base makes 1984's telescreens look like Blue Peter.
     This affects the food the megastores supply (see Joanna Blythman's well-documented Shopped): picked for market convenience, not for flavour – dull and often unripe, sold through special BOGOF deals – and then thrown out: a horrid 45% of it. Is our collective binge-eat-and-drink not just down to cheap booze but to food that tastes of nothing much?
     Supermarkets depend on food miles, in by air and heavy lorry, out by car. Imagine the carbon footprint, added to the huge roofed spaces that have, simultaneously, to be heated and cooled? Tesco will make its stores carbon-neutral by 2050, when I'm 106. Thanks. Since 1984 the modal shift in shopping trips has been from public transport to car, hitting perhaps a majority who are non-motorists – the young and old, and people on low incomes.
     Big supermarkets are always going to bring hundreds of jobs. Councillors applaud. But they are low-skill, low-wage and part-time jobs. Look upon near-derelict central Inverness and around it the megastores with their endless car parks and brainless architecture. In Austria and Switzerland they have attractive small supermarkets, but...oh forget it. Just ask what happens, not just to local service-sector jobs, but to Scottish-owned clothing chains like Mackays? To Scottish food-suppliers like Taypack potatoes of Inchture, who circulated MSPs about the pressure they come under from Asda?
     Tourism provides 10% of our national income. People come to us for scenery, quality of life, historic cities, towns and villages. Do they come to our malls? And, within a few years, will they be able to do so? We are nearing peak oil, when prices will go north of $200 a barrel. In 1999, the barrel stood at $10. What will be left of the motor age in 20 years? There won’t be hydrogen or electric cars, or not many: the transition – finding platinum for fuel cells, recycling toxic batteries, retooling factories – is too damn difficult. What's good for General Motors is good for America? Past tense, buddy.

III
How much should the state intervene? Because in Germany it isn't just market forces that secure the survival of niche retailers (like the organic stores, the bike workshops, the independent bookshops). There is intervention at Land level: a ministry for the Mittelstand (SMEs), social insurance for market traders, hostility (expressed through restrictive planning) to big supermarkets, and banning HGV trips at weekends. This is helped by – and helps – good public transport and town-centre parking, recycling depots, local breweries, vineyards, bottling plants.
     Can't we have – and not just in Scotland – trials in which ‘home town’ is matched against 'clone town'? The internal patterns of commerce and society within both can be measured, so that we understand the economic dynamics which hold communities together, or pull them apart. If we investigate the social and economic impact of large supermarkets on communities in comparison to other modes of retail, we will at least know what we are letting ourselves in for.
     Is local government, anyway, up to the job? I said unkind things about Lockerbie two years back, earning a day's tabloid notoriety, but overall agreement that there was a general small-town problem. The Tenants' and Residents' Association got in touch and what emerged was the artificial nature of Dumfries and Galloway Council, spread east-west over three quite different areas – Annandale, the Stewartry, and Wigtown. Lockerbie's links were not east-west but along the rail and road routes north (Glasgow) and south (Carlisle). Good transport didn't bring business but carried it away. The old burgh could have manoeuvred here; the new council left it high and dry.
     Our local government was the result of desperate Tory manoeuvres in the 1990s, and the result is a spatchcock. The 'equality' of Clackmannan and Highland amazes visitors; recent events at SPT ought to worry us. Authority has drained from communities to managers centred on our remaining factories or these days call-centres, hospitals, supermarkets or government centres – with rewards to suit and inevitable lack of transparency. As the energy/pollution problem worsens, solutions will have to be local, and everyone, regardless of age, will have to be trained to take them on. For this we require civic education and social service on European lines, a theme to which I will return.

Professor Christopher Harvie is SNP MSP for Mid Scotland and Fife, a distinguished historian, and has held senior academic posts in both Germany and Scotland.