Linwood: the thousandth cut
Allan Massie
It is a curious feeling, walking around a town that's been condemned to death. There are no signs of terminal disease in Linwood, none of the squalor and seedy decay that are the usual marks of dying industrial areas; nothing picturesque to attract the urban Romantic. It is all neat and clean-looking. Trim council houses, unusually well-built and pleasing to the eye, the iron railings with which their gardens are divided and protected often hidden by clipped privet or box hedges; gnomes odthe grass and china dogs and cats by the flowered curtains. All this is unsettling in itself. It shows it is not the 19th century that is dying here, but our own; and not the urban sprawl of the bad old days, but the planned development spawned by regional policy and public spirit; it is the Scotland moulded by the bureaucrats of St Andrew's House that is grinding to a halt. Shadows of birds are only starlings, not vultures. You cannot even see them as symbolic ones. Another cliche is too compelling: they are chickens coming home to roost; artificially reared battery chicks of course, chunky, pallid and tasteless.
But people live here in this town that was brought into being by the condemned car factory, even though in recent years more and more Linwood residents have preferred to seek work elsewhere, so that the consequences of the 4,800 men being thrown out of work will be spread around, in Johnstone and Paisley and across Renfrewshire as well as in Linwood itself. In this sense it is not as bad as if the closure had come a few years ago. Still there is a feeling that they have been part of an experiment that has failed. They have been manipulated. And of course there is a sharpening of that sense of hopelessness, of being victims of a malign fate, that is pervasive all over the West of Scotland. 'I realise never work again', says a shop steward. He might be 50.
Why has it failed? Naturally enough, in such circumstances, people are not inclined to blame themselves, and there is a strong, sharp resentment. To the outsider it might seem as if people here were given an opportunity when the factory opened 18 years ago, and that the doleful record of strikes and disputes shows that they were too bloody-minded, too deeply imbued with corrupt and myopic views, too insistent on immediate personal advantage, and, in short, too disinclined to work, to be able to seize that chance.
So blame is projected outwards: at them. Curiously few hold Peugeot immediately responsible, though Militant (The Marxist Taper for Labour and Youth') proclaims that 'Linwood has been starved of investment by its successive owners'; useless to point out to such deep thinkers that investment comes from profit, and that the plant has achieved that in only one year of its life. Jimmy Livingstone, the TGWU plant convenor, may say, 'All we have had is British taxpayers' money being wasted once again by multi-national companies', but most people blame the Government. 'We can't let Her get away with this.' It is the recession that has finally brought Linwood down, and we all know She did it on purpose. 'I think Mrs Thatcher would like to see the whole of Scotland become a wild-life park'. Hence the talk of a work-in, given a fillip by the miners' victory. It is unlikely that much will come of this, though; an ersatz town like Linwood has none of the communal strength of the miners or Upper Clyde shipworkers.
Appportioning responsibility is as complex as in any major disaster. Labour relations have always been bad. There was deep suspicion of Rootes from the start. It was well-known they had only come to Linwood because the Macmillan Govern ment twisted their arms painfully. `They needn't expect to find cheap labour or a subservient workforce', said a Scottish trade union spokesman at the time. They certainly didn't; instead they found a workforce with a craft heritage that took sullenly to assembly-line operations, and one which held to the fixed idea that is still mouthed: 'We don't believe that selling a job for £1,000 is right. It isn't ours to sell, it belongs to the community.' A job as a piece of property (private or common), a birthright; how much harm has that false, if understandable, notion done to the economy?
Management has been as bad here as elsewhere in the car industry with its hardly paralleled record of ineptitude, the position at Linwood being exacerbated by the sad fact that the factory has never had a good and desirable car to produce. Here, as so often, design failures have contributed to poor performance. Marketing has been equally feeble. Neither Rootes nor Chrysler made any real attempt to associate the Linwood cars with Scotland. They could have called it the Hillman Rob Roy; instead they named it the Imp. So there has been no local pride in the product. If you are knocked down by a car in Turin, 20-1 on it's a Fiat that does the job, but in Linwood or Paisley it's as likely to be a Ford or Datsun as a Hillman or Chrysler or Talbot. An attempt at such association might have done something to overcome the handicaps that distance from the main car markets presented. Component firms never followed Rootes to Scotland, so that costs of production were always higher than they would have been in the Midlands. That made the workers' claim to be paid national rates an inevitable point of dispute. None of the managements was ever able to work out the sum involving capital costs, wage costs and raw material and component costs so as to produce a satisfactory answer. Hence the vicious whirlpool of decline, failure breeding failure; starved of investment by the absence of profit, the plant became ever less competitive.
By the time Peugeot took over it was almost certainly too late. Machinery and equipment were out of date, and the plant could only produce 30,000 units a year; quite inadequate. Then came the slump. With Talbot's share of a contracting UK market dropping from eight to six per cent, and Linwood's ageing Avengers and Sunbeams accounting for a mere two per cent of British sales, there was no need to summon a Daniel to interpret the writing on this wall; it was as unequivocal as the graffiti on any Glasgow tenement, When you consider also that back home in France Citroen sales had dropped 18 per cent, Peugeot 16 per cent and Talbot 30 per cent in 1980, -the decision to close a loss-making factory north of Hadrian's Wall which would need anything between £120 and £200 million to modernise became as inevitable as a Gaullist 'Non'. Linwood's 4,800 could not fail to be part of the 45,000 employees Peugeot will have had to shed throughout the world by the end of this year. Ironically it comes at a time when labour relations have been happier than ever before in Linwood. No strikes; productivity up 24 per cent last year. `Magnifique, mais. . Was is a mistake from the start? Created for political, not economic, motives, it may well be that, in Jock Bruce-Gardyne's words, 'if the tens of millions sunk without trace in Renfrewshire had not had to be raised through taxation, borrowing or the Printing press, perhaps there might have been more real jobs around in Scotland today'. Perhaps. Essentially unprovable, these are not words that will commend themselves to the Socialists in the STUC or to the old Socialist in Birch Lodge himself. Nevertheless, they do raise the other question that looms whenever a branch factory Closes . Scotland — and that includes the trade unionists who squawk loudest at failures like Linwood — has gone down on its knees to attract inward investment in the last 25 Years. What about generating it here? The SNP will raise the question of an oil fund again. They will not be alone. Apart from that, half the top investment trusts are Scottish-based and in 1979 it was estimated that they had £1 billion invested abroad; Scottish-based insurance companies (General Accident, Scottish Widows etc) hold huge overseas portfolios. Why not? They get better returns. But might it not be sensible to frame a fiscal policy that would encourage them to place more of that money at home?
Finally, as one walks around the douce decent town and talks to the inhabitants, one wonders if anything can be done. Talk of persuading Nissan-Datsun to take over the factory is hopeless; it sounds like the old mistake of repeating history (first time played as tragedy, next time as farce), of doing the wrong thing for the right reason. All the same, as closures sweep across North Ayrshire and Renfew, with unemployment 23 per cent here, 30 per cent there, 40 per cent in June,rumblings of dangerous discontent sound through the despair. One company still in business is Roche, making vitamins at Dalry. Maybe George Younger should urge them to expand and produce Valium locally. After all, that will command a market as the psychological problems of unemployment multiply. Valium and Space Invaders equal panem et circenses, yes?
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