Society

 

Third World Scotland

 

Thom Cross

 

Plains, Lanarkshire
Photograph by Islay McLeod

 

In one of my infrequent pilgrimages from abroad to my hame in Kirkcaldy, I underwent the regular ritual. I would visit the auld folks up in the cemetery and then down to Nile Street, with the North School across the street. My father was the jannie there for 35 years and my mother the dinner woman. (The fact that they were able to produce three bairns – two successful graduates and a brilliant Chopin pianist and music teacher – offers a snapshot of what Labourism, at its best, meant to Fife. It also dramatically illustrates the loss of Labour as a justice-confirming, social-transforming force for change.)
     But I wasn't finished emotionally or indeed politically on that Kirkcaldy visit. Down the street,  I was shocked to see a kind of Armani army of expensive suits parading along the High Street.
     This was the vanguard of Tony Blair's early pre-election tour (circa July 1996) and he was about to walk upon our street. Then the great young bonnie prince Tony arrived within a quite enormous entourage of more suits. As he passed me by I shouted out (in my big theatre-trained voice): 'Mr Blair, job number one, is jobs!'.
     Suddenly, from apparently all directions came a posse of professional minders. I immediately thought they were plainclothes polis. But no, they were his focus team groupies: his PR and political research advisers; his demographic issue dippers etc. They surrounded me, attacking me with questions.
     The main point of concern was that I had proposed 'jobs' as the number 1 issue, rather than the politicos' no. 1 topic, devolution. I argued that, in Fife, the blight of unemployment was crippling the community with pockets of intense unemployment of over 20%.
     Jobs, I proposed, had to be provided in order to ensure that there were the necessary material conditions for any expression of support for further constitutional change. I argued that, without jobs, the population of Fife would drift into the well-kent social pathology of lumpenism or a dependent state-feudalism. This Labourist state-impoverishment places the poor and the powerless in a sub-democratic dependency that fuels social pathology with a deadening of the spirit.

 

     Fifteen years on, I am in Lanarkshire, and the similar pall of pathetic jobless despair hangs over Wishaw, Motherwell, Carluke and their associated wee toons like Overton, Bonkle, Newmains, Pather, Law and the list could fill the page. Now we have the cruelty of crude bankers' capitalism dumping our youth into further social despair.
     Here, unemployment is not simply endemic but hereditary. Those remaining of the 35,000 men thrown out by Thatcher with the closure of Ravenscraig and the other steel works in and around Motherwell, now have sons, daughters and grand-weans on the social. Many tried desperately to ensure this would not happen. Sending their children to college to become nurses or teachers meant sacrifice. Now, even in these former safe and sure job options, there is the closed door of unemployment. There are no trades to enter, no construction work, no council work; even the military is cutting back. Deficit reduction means a further life of multi-deprivation in Lanarkshire.
     I have seen this community degradation in Kingston, Jamaica. There the young people, and indeed adults, created their own serious survival strategies, with tragic outcomes for their own lives and indeed the wider economy. Cuts in communities that had so very little create dread repercussions. Some may seek to rubbish my third world context for parts of Scotland but I am daily struck by the overwhelming sense of commonality of underdevelopment. Serious socio-economic deprivation, mass powerlessness, alienation, extensive drug-dependency, cultural schizophrenia are all too familiar symptoms of the classical neo-colonial condition of persistent poverty.
     What is left for the dispossessed?
     Cameron (increasingly sounding like Lord Charles the ventriloquist's posh dummy) announces grandly that there will be 20,000 new retail jobs. 'We mon be poor, but we are no' glaickit nor feckless gowks', my old man used to say. The Cameron boast is a sick, cynical promise.
     Of every 100 jobs in the supermarket business fewer than 10 are full-time, offering a sub-living wage (£6+ per hour). A store with 450 employees might have three full-time managers, 10 team leaders full time and that is it. The rest of the colleagues work 12-30 hours a week, the majority work 20-30 hours a week. (£400-480 per month net). 20,000 jobs means desperately poorly paid part-time workers, working for a fixed low rate.
     What is to be done? The May elections must offer the communities of unemployed and the underemployed a greater share of the national income. In areas of high social deprivation the dispossessed must make its voice heard. Education and training in the new green industries should be a core course at, for example, the new Motherwell College so that Lanarkshire may learn to make things again. But there is more. How do we rehumanise these desperate, lost communities?  How do we give lives hope again in the dark winter of cuts and more cuts? Let me leave you with McDiarmid from 'To Circumjack Cencratus'.
 
Lourd on my heart as winter lies
The state that Scotland's in the day
Spring in the North has aye come slow
But noo dour winter's like stay
For guid,
And no for guid!
 
Nae womder if I think I see
A lichter shadow than the neist
I’m fain to cry: 'The dawn, the dawn!'
I see it breakin' in the East.
But ah
Its just mair snaw!

 

Kirkcaldy-born Thom Cross is a former head of the Jamaica School of Drama at the Edna Manley Centre in Kingston and has worked in the Caribbean for over 30 years.