Scotland on the Move
IT is most unlikely that the people of Los Angeles took much notice of the arrival on Sunday of Mr. Michael Noble, Secretary of State for Scotland. Even if their baseball team, the Dodgers, had not just entered the American halls of fame by beating the New York Yankees in four straight games in the World Series, the visit of a British politician who is obscure in most parts of his own country would not have caused much excitement. But Mr. Noble has not gone to receive general acclaim. He wants to meet businessmen in California and the Mid-West, and persuade them to establish new industries in Scotland.
This sounds very prosaic, but it is very essential. New American industry has been one of the most important factors in the attempt to convert the Scottish economy from one superbly fitted to meet the industrial requirements of the nineteenth century into one which is growing fast enough to employ fully the labour force, and to lower the outrageou% v high rate of emigration in the mid-twentieth Sine the war, enough American firms have gone to Scotland to account for 6 per cent of its industrial production. But 6 per cent is not enough, and Mr. Noble's job is to persuade more Americans to come to Britain, and sec what there is to'offer.
There will be a lot more to offer at the end of this month when the Government White Papers on the planned industrial development of Scot- land and the North East are released. The Government has finally realised that the decline of traditional industries in the North is happen- ing much faster than it thought or feared. And the White Papers will almost certainly contain measures which will give these areas positive advantages over other, wealthier, parts of Britain.
They will make a deliberate effort to create an environment of industrial development, centred primarily on new towns, which should appeal to American businessmen, and, indeed, to English businessmen who have been slower in the past to recognise the advantages of industrial location in Scotland away from the crowded conurbations and the evils of wage drift. The object of the Government's proposals will be to reduce levels of unemployment by making positive efforts to attract industry to areas like Scotland, instead of offering little more than the charity implied in the Local Employment Act. But legislation, by itself, is not going to solve Scotland's problems. Nor can it be expected to. Some of the problems implicit in industrial development in 'backward' regions are discussed more fully in an article by Stephen Fay on another page. But one of the greatest of these is to use the incentives offered by Government as effectively as possible. In fact, they have to be sold hard. This is what Mr. Noble is doing in America now. It is what the Scottish Council and the North East Development Council have been doing for years.
This winter is likely to be their most successful for some time. Scottish newspapers have been chronicling more new developments in the past few weeks than for many months, and there are more to come. The problems of employment and of the structure of these regional economies are far from solved. They will probably grow greater before they are solved. But the prospect of their being solved is growing brighter. A combination of better legislation and the kind of hard work being done by Mr. Noble is the essential part of the process.
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