Our industrial talent has been derailed

I was being filmed in Glasgow’s Central Station when I was asked for my views on the UK’s largest rail authority, Network Rail.

This was in a week when our greedy wee choo-choo operators had announced whacking fares increases. You can imagine my response. It wasn’t pretty!

But what really had me ranting was hearing that while up to 12, 000 new jobs will be created by Network Rail over the next five years, because of a skills shortage most of these posts will have to be filled by overseas applicants.

What were my views they asked? What did I think Network Rail and our governments should do about it?

I was stunned. Here I was standing in a station in city that was once the industrial heartbeat of the western world, hearing that Scotland and the UK has fallen so far behind that we are now barely able to fill even a fraction of the vacancies being created.

My answers were many and varied, but the truth is that decades of cuts, lack of investment and intervention by successive UK governments, especially Thatcher’s, in our heavy industry and engineering works have taken their toll and drained the soul of our once proud workforce.

Our huge shipbuilding industry has been all but left to run aground. Our great iron and steelworks, once employers of thousands, have gone to rust. Our coal mines have become pits of despair. Our car manufacturing has been driven into oblivion and what is left of the rail industry is struggling to fill its vacancies because there are few left skilled enough to do the work.

Foreign labour might be cheaper but that isn’t the reason they are looking abroad. Nor are they short of people who would willingly do the work if they knew how.

The simple fact is that vital skills have been lost over the years and there isn’t enough skilled labour to fill the vacancies.

There are too few apprenticeships being offered or youth programmes created and there are hardly any firms left to offer them work.

And no one, it seems especially Westminster and massive employers like Network Rail, subsidised by a whopping £10bn per annum by the taxpayer are doing anything about it.

Instead of looking abroad for applicants why are they not shaving off some of that subsidy to invest in building colleges and techs?

Why, especially given it’s taxpayers’ money in the main that keeps them on the rails, are they not investing in our own disenfranchised youth, looking in their own backyard for the young talent they need? Why are they not making a commitment to back those missing skills by creating apprenticeship?

Then they wouldn’t have to worry about a labour shortage.

Not every child is an academic, they’re not all IT specialists or financial whizzkids in the making, they will not all be part of the green energy revolution.

There are many out there who would like to get their hands dirty and learn a trade. But because of a lack of decent investment and forward thinking they are being denied, and that is tragic.

I lament the passing of our great manufacturing industries. It saddens me that the once great industrial Clydeside has become nothing more than a sterile pedestrian walkway or that Ravenscraig has been flattened.

And it maddens me that vital skills were also allowed to disappear when those great industries were closed, making it nigh impossible for us to ever again be competitive in those sectors.

If Watt, Telford and Stephenson were around today they would weep.