The ghost on the stairs

is the least of

our problems

Kenneth Roy

 

The lone dog in no-hope Scotland
Photograph by Islay McLeod

Will the last person to leave John Finnie Street please turn out the lights? The Scottish Review finds itself at the centre – almost literally so – of what is now the second-worst unemployment blackspot in the UK. There is, from our selfish point of view, more discouraging news still. The magazine and its publisher (the Institute of Contemporary Scotland) may soon be part of the problem.
     When we came here nine years ago, our office building in the heart of Kilmarnock, in a listed but half-derelict Victorian street, was fully occupied by small businesses of various kinds. There was about the place an air of purposeful activity, if not conspicuous prosperity; we considered ourselves fortunate to have stumbled upon such a convenient billet.
     It was never more than a charming slum. The roof leaked; it has been leaking again this week in what Gerry Hassan bravely calls the Scottish spring. One day, when we dared to open the window of my own office, it disintegrated before our eyes.
     Yet we are happy. We look out across the rooftops of Kilmarnock, above to the Gothic menace of the academy and below to cobbled Bank Street where we adoped as our local the Goldberry Arms, frequented by Willie McIlvanney on his occasional visits to his native town and which the local branch of the Scottish Socialist Party used as its informal meeting place until it treacherously relocated to Wetherspoons for cheaper beer. To the nearest rooftop the same family of seagulls returns faithfully each year. How do I know it is the same family? I don't. The racket can be appalling.
     One by one our neighbours abandoned us until only the seagulls remain, and the occasional drookit pigeon on the perilous window-sill. I hope it wasn't something I said – or, more likely, wrote. Some of the neighbours went bust, others drifted off without so much as a farewell note. We had a rather exciting moonlight flit; just the one. For a while the local authority, East Ayrshire Council, took up the slack, renting at a time of municipal optimism all the available units. We were full again.
     Suddenly the Scottish Review was joined across the corridor by the 'Skills Development and Employability Service'. Every Friday, a procession of unemployed young lads on work placements arrived with their precious time-sheets – the written justification for their existence, the proof. As often as not they would press our buzzer in error. 'Time sheet', they would squawk, as insistently as a young seagull, imploring us to admit them to the building. And so we became familiar with the voice, if not the face, of the young unemployed of whom, if speculation about last month's figures is to be trusted, there are now a million throughout the UK. The very word 'time-sheet' makes me want to weep in despair.

 

     But they distract us no longer: even the council is going. The small departments located here are being re-homed elsewhere in the town in a tighter, centralised operation. By the summer, if we stayed, we would be rattling around in an otherwise empty building. But, since our lease is almost up anyway, we're going too.
     At one stage we thought we would move to the purpose-built office block being planned by the council for a vacant site next to the bus station, but one of the first acts of our new SNP administration was to abandon the scheme on grounds on cost. (In view of recent events, I should add that this is not intended as a criticism of the SNP. It's simply yet another dull fact.) The alternatives are unpalatable. What few offices there are for rent in Kilmarnock aren't fit for the melancholy mutt whose photograph adorns this piece. Of which we have seen a few. Offices, that is. Though mutts, also.
     Unless, then, a small miracle occurs, we will be leaving town. The big employers have already packed up – the carpet-makers and shoe-makers and Johnnie Walker whisky bottlers. Where do they make tractors these days? Not in Kilmarnock, for sure; on my way to work in the morning I pass the old Massey-Ferguson plant and wonder occasionally whatever happened to our gift for making things of utility, even beauty.
     All that Kilmarnock has left, apart from the council and the burgeoning criminal court – perhaps the only growth industry in town – and the usual collection of building societies and chain stores are the small employers like this charity and magazine. I don't kid myself that our departure will be any great loss. But the history of this building in the last nine years, the development years of Scottish devolution, is the story of a creeping, accumulating loss – of enterprise and of hope. As I climb the stairs in the morning to write this piece, it is not the ghost said to haunt the penultimate landing which concerns me. It is the evidence at every darkened door of the fate of a town and of post-industrial Scotland in general. That is a somewhat larger spectre.
     Here is a sad and shaming fact. Of the five worst unemployment blackspots in the UK, measured by the TUC according to the number of dole claimants per vacancy, three are in Scotland. Our neighbouring authority of North Ayrshire is fourth, just behind the London Borough of Haringey, but the unlooked-for first prize goes to West Dunbartonshire, where 94 job vacancies in March were chased by 3,786 dole claimants – a ratio of more than 40 for every job. Yet, in the same league table six years ago, West Dunbartonshire was ranked only 38th worst, suggesting a remarkable decline in its fortunes.
     Why has this happened? These local calamities, cumulatively of enormous significance, are overlooked and unreported. They deserve our attention. They aren't getting it. If you want to know why the constitutional excitements of the last fortnight fail to grip me in the required manner, I suggest you come to Kilmarnock and find out for yourself.

 

Kenneth Roy is editor of the Scottish Review

 

Click here for Close-up: Islay McLeod's view of Scotland's unemployment blackspots