ISSUE 51
A Northern County?
48
THE DROUTH
SPRING 2015
ISSUE 51
THE DROUTH
SPRING 2015
Aidan Kerr
Lanarkshire was the hallowed ground which powered Scotland’s booming heavy industry for nearly two hundred years. Today, the sites of Lanarkshire’s furnaces which once towered over whole towns are now but empty fields. A visitor unaware of the area’s history would perhaps not even realise that mass industrialisation had ever taken place; Mother Nature has reclaimed the land. There are many gruesome details of the region’s decline. One of the most prominent is that the county of Lanarkshire itself no longer exists and is now partitioned into two completely synthetic administration areas; ‘North Lanarkshire’ and ‘South Lanarkshire’. The failure of Scotland’s numerous local government reforms throughout the 20th century are illustrated most prominently in this carving up of land in search of ‘modernisation’. How we came to live with the beast of North Lanarkshire council is indeed a tragic tale. We can chart the fall of Lanarkshire alongside the stuttering and eventual collapse of the county’s and indeed the nation’s, heavy industries. Did this dual tragedy unfold in tandem? So tragic is the tale it was enough to reduce hardened Lanarkshire steel workers to tears in front of television cameras as the gates of Ravenscraig slammed shut in 1992 and the furnaces halted after decades of continual, round-the-clock use. The land which Ravenscraig stood upon now lies scarred. The demolition left the largest brownfield site in Europe and a puzzling question of what to fill it with. Scarred also are the nearby towns of Motherwell and Wishaw who relied on “the Craig” for much needed employment. Across Lanarkshire the spectrum of deindustrialisation was dealt evenly and brutality. The Dundyvan steelworks in Coatbridge where my father worked for twenty something years until the early 1990s, gone. Lanarkshire was once famed for its coal 49
ISSUE 51
THE DROUTH
mining yet every one of the county’s collieries are gone and have been for thirty or so years. These sites exist now only in memory and as museum exhibits. A dramatic decline from the backbone of an empire shovelling the black stuff into the fire of locomotives to an unemployment blackspot, Scotland’s traditional 33 counties were thrown into the dustbin of history in 1973 following the passing of the Local Government (Scotland) Act by Edward Heath’s Conservative government. The Act largely followed on from the recommendations of the Royal Commission on Local Government in Scotland of 1969. It was believed that the end of the county system was badly needed and with modernity beckoning these historical polities were inefficient forms of planning infrastructure, and that you had to upscale the project, thus this was the raison d’etre behind the biggest beast in Scottish local government: Strathclyde Regional Council. To allow a smooth transition the Act came into being in 1975 a year after the first elections to the new authorities took place. As predicted Labour swept into control of Strathclyde, which contained around 2 million residents and ushered in an era of large local government administered by one party sole party. To all intents and purposes Lanarkshire was now dead, long live Strathclyde. What bound the people of Lanarkshire together for hundreds of years was their shared experience of life. Together they plunged into the bowels of the earth to mine the coal which powered an empire. When Lanarkshire’s men were ordered to the trenches of the western front during the Great War, Lanarkshire’s women stepped in to breach the gap in munitions factories. Communities formed around the county’s collieries, iron and later steel works. The labour was both arduous and dangerous, yet it gave working class people a sense of fulfilment being able to see the fruits of their labour. You can see the amount of coal you dug or how many rolls of steel you reshaped at the end of the shift, you can’t really get the same sense of achievement from seeing how many calls of complaint you handled at a call centre. Those workplaces are gone and in large part so is the community spirit that ran through these villages and towns.
50
SPRING 2015
ISSUE 51
THE DROUTH
SPRING 2015
51
ISSUE 51
THE DROUTH
It is that sense of a shared human experience and a shared identity which forged Lanarkshire. Yet, both of these traits are sorely missing from the rump authority of North Lanarkshire. Established in 1996-the same year that the Ravenscraig steelworks was demolished-North Lanarkshire has been one of the most high profile failures of John Major’s Scottish local government reforms. One of the many downfalls of North Lanarkshire is that it completely lacks any element of civic pride or identity. North Lanarkshire is but a series of arbitrary lines on the map of Central Scotland, not drawn from historical community boundaries or geography but from a desire to saw Strathclyde Regional Council into several pieces. Created in a panic, this fracturing of Strathclyde has not vastly improved administration of the area’s various infrastructure or services or in any meaningful way brought the decision making process ‘closer’ to local communities. While at the same time Lanarkshire’s citizens began to commute daily to new service sector jobs in Glasgow as industrial jobs became a mere memory the government pulled the administration of their communities away from Glasgow to Motherwell. The creation of North Lanarkshire Council has then opened a huge spending and funding gap to emerge for the bordering Glasgow City Council authority. Many North Lanarkshire residents spend their working week commuting into Glasgow and indeed their leisure time in Glasgow. A wide range of Glasgow City Council funded services is being used then by non-residents. From the most basic of services such as the emptying of public bins to the upkeep of roads travelled on by North Lanarkshire residents commuting to work within Glasgow’s boundaries. As a result the city’s taxpayers are paying for the upkeep of council services that are being used by North Lanarkshire residents whose council tax does not fund their continual maintenance. Across a spectrum of statistics we can see that the effects deindustrialisation and the loss of sources of employment is still being felt in the region decades on. North Lanarkshire’s men
52
SPRING 2015
who were at the coal face of heavy industry, often literally, now find themselves increasingly likely to be unemployed compared to their counterparts in the rest of the country. The male unemployment rate in North Lanarkshire stands at 9.2% compared to the UK wide (excluding Northern Ireland) male average of 6.8%. The loss of these employment sources has also affected North Lanarkshire’s young people. The most recent statistics show that 5.8% of 18-24 year old North Lanarkshire residents are claiming Job Seekers Allowance compared to the national average only 3.1%. Those who were not even alive or just toddlers when Lanarkshire’s industry was demolished are not escaping the effects of deindustrialisation. In addition to the problems of unemployment North Lanarkshire also contains huge numbers of those who are deemed ‘long term sick’ and are economically inactive due to this. Of those in North Lanarkshire who are economically inactive 41.1% fall into this category due to being ‘long term sick’ compared to the national UK average of 21.8%. It is speculated that a high long term sick rate could be triggered by the very industrious work that bound the people of Lanarkshire together. From the dust of mines to industrial accidents in steel mills the price of decently paid skilled work was ill health in many cases. Heavy industry then not only scarred North Lanarkshire’s landscape but its people. With the lack of heavy industries the interaction between various settlements and communities in North Lanarkshire is virtually non-existent. In the past for instance steel forged communities across Lanarkshire together. Ravenscraig and other steel producing sites did not just employ people directly at the source but many other satellite businesses were directly and indirectly employed via its production. From the strip mill at Gartcosh to the Clyde Alloy steel works in Netherton. Lanarkshire’s communities were forged together by their common labour. This is no more. As labour in Scotland has become atomised and alienated so too has North Lanarkshire’s communities which has manifested into a lack of civic identity or sense of attachment to even the authorities name. Today there is nothing which binds the communities together, no common labour, no common way of life,
ISSUE 51
THE DROUTH
no interdependence for employment. North Lanarkshire is in many ways a microcosm of the changes in British capitalism in the last 30 years We see inside North Lanarkshire not only no cohesive community interdependence but also in some cases friction. The authority is governed from Motherwell, the fourth largest settlement, and the residents of the largest Cumbernauld often feel aggrieved with municipal matters. Cumbernauld residents regularly complain of being ‘forgotten about’ by North Lanarkshire Council. The town is also far more supportive of the SNP compared to the rest of the region’s support for Labour (though this may change soon). In 2012 the council ward of Cumbernauld South returned an SNP candidate in first place-in stark contrast to the rest of the local authority. Furthermore the neighbouring council ward of Cumbernauld North returned an ex-SNP councillor standing as independent under the banner ‘Cumbernauld Independent Councillors Alliance’ comfortably in first place alongside another SNP councillor, despite splitting the vote. Cumbernauld is a ‘New Town’ created in 1956 which lacks the industrial history of the many other settlements of North Lanarkshire. It is no surprise then that a great section of the 50,000 Cumbernauld residents feel little attachment to North Lanarkshire or indeed the Labour party. The residents of Cumbernauld then pay their council tax to a town they have little engagement with and even less sense of identity with. North Lanarkshire therefore is a broken county with a broken economy. How to repair either is a question which is yet to be answered. The local government pariah of Strathclyde Regional Council had numerous flaws across its two decade history. It was an urban based ‘local’ authority governing rural island communities miles away that had no real interaction with the city of Glasgow. You have to seriously question how on earth it was deemed appropriate that an the island community such as Ulva in the Inner Hebrides ended up being governed from Glasgow’s City Chambers. One doesn’t sense a longing for a return to those days.
SPRING 2015
Yet, Glasgow attracts many non-Glasgow City Council residents with its vast array of seemingly never decreasing service sector jobs. These are Jobs which simply aren’t to be found in the same volume in Motherwell or Wishaw. With good public transport links from many areas of North Lanarkshire to Glasgow then it is increasingly attractive to commute to Glasgow for work and return home while at the same time paying a lesser rate of council tax than their Glasgow based work colleagues. We could turn to a greater Glasgow model in which the City Chambers begins to manage the infrastructure and receive the revenues from places like Cumbernauld, Motherwell and Coatbridge. This would certainly bridge the funding gap allowing infrastructure used on by these commuters to be paid for by them. Indeed in terms of identity one could imagine the people of these towns feeling a far greater sense of identity with Glasgow than the synthetic, plastic title of ‘North Lanarkshire’ which truly exists only as a council tax bureaucracy. Lanarkshire’s identity hailed from the shared industrial revolution and labour which the people experienced. That is gone and in many ways Lanarkshire can never return. What is here today and growing ever faster is a new economy based on the financial and service sector. Perhaps handling customer complaints at a call centre is not as rewarding or gives a sense of an honest day’s work as industry does but that is the way of the world and cannot be changed. A shared identity through the labour market created the Lanarkshire we speak of in reverent tones; this would exist today within a greater Glasgow. Though many would protest that large ‘local’ authorities do not give accountability in the same was as miniature municipalities such as in Sweden. Indeed the good people of Cumbernauld would perhaps feel even more remote from Glasgow City Chambers than from Motherwell? The question which faces those who wish to reform local government is how to bridge the local authority funding gap and create a civic identity which people can find in a post-industrial areas such as Lanarkshire. I certainly know North Lanarkshire is not the answer.
53