Christopher Silver: Bridging the gap where Scottish engineering used to be

Smack bang in the middle, you’ll find an ornamental clock depicting the Forth Bridge. A wonder of that era, and a wonder still, I recall a strange jolt of pleasure at seeing something so familiar so far from home. Prior to that, I was just another Frappuccino-sipping punter like everyone else, but here was a secret differentiation that was my own. I think some call that feeling national pride.

The bridge achieves something that few ­structures ever do: it is so integral to the ­landscape that it seems hard to imagine its ­absence, or to conceive of how people adapted to its arrival. Once, there was no red cantilevered cliff face, and then there was.

While it remains a chokepoint in the ­network (one that the Scottish Greens’ proposed tunnel would help circumvent) I would miss the ­precipitous view as a necessary step in all those journeys north, often journeys home, that I have made. Chastised, triumphant, bleary or wide-eyed, the expanse of the firth always offers something to wonder at.

Of course, the shiny new road bridge further along can’t compete. Not least because of its strangely placeless name; hymned by Scots ­Makar Jackie Kay in her poem “Queensferry Crossing”.

The bridge in Kay’s poem is not quite many things: part ship, part cormorant, at one point a harp. But in the end it is only really symbol: “The urge to build bridges runs deeper/than the great rivers they ford.”

What the bard must overlook is that, while we may have the urge to build bridges of the mind, we no longer have the capacity to build actual bridges – leaving such things to China, mostly.

This is a kind of national orphanhood: we continue to imagine that we are a people of engineers, builders and makers/makars – who somehow still feel kinship with the image of a bridge when we stumble across it in Manhattan.

The reality is that we no longer know how to build or engineer, and so are simply left with the empty urge, and instead slip over the river up or down the M90, leaving little trace.

This could be easily brushed off as braindead nostalgia – like a folk singer droning on about how the old bridge was better than the new one, and how the ferry was actually better than the first bridge, and how the ferrymen were broken-hearted when they could no longer ply their ­noble route.

Despite the weight of industrial memories in the mind and on the landscape, such ­dismissal is still all too common and often comes from the same voices who want to wrap up the ­powerhouse past into a tale of inventions and innovators. This has in turn fed a strain of easy progress in Scottish politics that was validated by the devolution settlement. Back then, Scots were simply moving with broader trends in a rapidly globalised economy: the Parliament ­itself seemed to embody a post-national way of doing things.

Climate change upends this, along with most of the breezy assumptions of Middle Scotland that still echo across the Holyrood chamber. The spectre of global crisis and climate ­disruption makes even seemingly permanent structures unstable. The pandemic is a mere warm-up, perhaps, to coming decades in which ­normative affluence and comfort are elusive: ­either to be still more jealously guarded, or to be held in common.

This is all the more challenging for a politics that still runs in fear from embedded popular nightmares about the 1970s: a decade ­dominated by debates over wages rather than interest rates, in which the ideal political subject lived from selling their labour rather than off fixed assets.

But questions of work are at the heart of how we adapt to the era of climate breakdown: ­specifically the forms of work that we choose to prioritise, the means by which it is ­organised, the core functions that its serves. In a report out this week, Sepa claims that climate change will cost Glasgow alone £400 million a year: a price tag that, in a nation of engineers or ­political ­innovators, could be recast as ­investment. ­Instead, we’re left feeling redundant; with that empty feeling that someone else will do the work.

ADDRESSING the need for an unprecedented re-organisation of Scotland’s precarious, service-centric workforce, is the unspeakable prospect that no one wants to confront. Instead, technocratic fixes like a Universal Basic Income are debated to deflect from the looming need for economic transformation. Such fixes promise to dispel the truth that work in the contemporary economy is increasingly soul-sapping and purposeless. Given that it is ultimately organised in the service of a tiny class of the incomprehensibly wealthy while the planet burns, this should not to be surprising.

The good work of transformation requires a vast rediscovery of economic agency. Scotland currently lacks the capacity not only to build large bridges, it lacks the capacity to effectively construct wind farms, district heating systems and public transport networks. Even a couple of ferries are too much to ask.

What do our current priorities look like on the ground?

Scoot up the bridge to one of Fife’s ­largest modern-day employers to Amazon’s vast ­Dunfermline operation and you will find the work of destruction carried out on an apocalyptic scale. It’s a place staffed by workers bused in from across the country, hired and fired and treated with the kind of disdain once associated with the depression era. The task of some of these workers, as revealed by ITV News in an undercover investigation, is to fulfil a target of destroying 130,000 unused items a week. Meanwhile, before the oil in the North Sea is channelled to Grangemouth to be transformed into petrol, plastics and perhaps eventually the unused products in Amazon’s bins, those who work it are struggling for a post-carbon future.

As a recent report by Friends of the Earth ­Scotland, Platform and Greenpeace found – workers want to transfer their skills via a ­“passport” into the offshore renewables sector. Existing regimes and the globalised companies that run the show don’t allow for this.

THIS is part of a wider picture in which offshore wind fabrication for Scottish waters is carried out in Indonesia, and maintenance can be a mirky business, often carried out by “flags of convenience” vessels staffed by workers paid a pittance.

This litany of failure is the result of an ­economy that is organised around extraction, servitude and consumption, while our ongoing reliance on inward investment makes for policy that is skittish and biddable.

In the year Glasgow hosts COP26 ­Scotland’s carbon-heavy, car reliant, consumption ­economy will be presented to the world as a global leader: a rhetorical disguise for the lack of agency and will in Edinburgh to ­pursue a ­programme of ­systematic public ­intervention. The nation of ­engineers is now much more akin in its governing logics to a nation of management ­consultants.

There is a twin image in Kay’s bridge poem – “A girl crosses the old red in a crimson dress/An old man walks the suspension” – the latter evoking the iconic black and white images of ­workers walking the Forth Road Bridge’s suspension cables out into the void.

If the girl grows up to be an engineer we might not fall in.