Marie Comments on today's Spring Statement from Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves.
Marie Comments on today's Spring Statement from Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves.
Marie Comments on today's Spring Statement from Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves.
“The downgrading in forecast growth outlined by the Chancellor may well have been expected, but the fact that growth projections have been slashed by half shows the extent of the deep-seated challenges facing the UK economy.
It poses the fundamental question of where long-term growth is going to come from. And it means we can’t keep on with more of the same economic policies and expect to get different, better outcomes.
Instead, what is needed is a fundamental rebalancing of the economy, with a determined focus on reindustrialisation, and specifically on manufacturing. Without a solid manufacturing base, Scotland and the UK will not produce sustained economic growth and will struggle to match the performance of many of our international competitors.
That means serious and sustained investment in manufacturing is essential, in addition to efforts to protect and safeguard existing industry, such as the Grangemouth plant here in Scotland. Allowing such key pieces of national infrastructure to be lost flies completely in the face of stated goals for a just transition to the industries and jobs of the future.
Making the most of our huge assets – natural resources, infrastructure and skilled people – is the path to a sustainable future.
We also need dedicated efforts to encourage entrepreneurship, so that more people are persuaded to start their own businesses, creating the small and medium enterprises that are the engine of our economy.
While I agree that getting substantially more people back into the workforce and economically active is not only a good but a necessary thing, it is also essential that that is done in a way that supports both growth and society as a whole. Cuts to welfare should not mean reducing support for those who need it most.”
Marie Appears on the BBC Radio 2, Jeremy Vine Show LIVE from Glasgow.
Marie Appears on the BBC Radio 2, Jeremy Vine Show LIVE from Glasgow.
Marie Appears on the BBC Radio 2, Jeremy Vine Show LIVE from Glasgow.
Marie was delighted to join the BBC’s Jeremy Vine on Friday 14th March as he brought his Radio 2 show to Glasgow venue King Tut’s for a lively mix of music and topical discussion.
Marie was also joined by Stephen Gethins MP as they discussed aspects of the proposed state visit to the UK by US President Donald Trump, and the wider debate the issue has sparked.
Echoing her previous comments outlined in her article in the Times following last November’s US election, Marie made clear the need for positive engagement with the Trump administration, in line with that shown last week by First Minister John Swinney.
The show was an enjoyable chance for Marie to outline her views as a respected voice in Scotland’s business community, and she looks forward to more such opportunities in the weeks and months ahead.
Marie Joins Leading Global Agency, Chartwell Speakers.
Marie Joins Leading Global Agency, Chartwell Speakers.
Renowned keynote speaker, business leader, and advocate for regeneration and sustainability, Marie is now proudly represented by Chartwell Speakers, a globally recognised speakers agency committed to connecting extraordinary individuals with audiences worldwide.
Marie brings a unique perspective to the conversation. Through keynote speeches, panel discussions, event hosting, podcasts, and media contributions, she shares her inspiring journey, thought-provoking insights, and actionable strategies for a more sustainable and innovative future Marie has delivered impactful and dynamic presentations for global organisations such as Iberdrola, NASA, Scottish Power, and Barclays, as well as esteemed educational institutions and leadership networks, including Women in Business.
A respected voice in media, she contributes to The New York Times, The Times, and The Observer, as well as national radio and television, appearing on LBC, STV, and the BBC. Her ability to engage diverse audiences makes her a sought-after speaker shaping conversations on sustainable leadership and innovation at both local and international levels.
Founded in London in 2007, Chartwell Speakers has established itself as a premier agency, placing thought leaders and motivational speakers at thousands of events and conferences across the globe.
Marie shared her excitement about this new partnership…”I’m thrilled to be working with Chartwell Speakers and look forward to sharing my story and passion for regeneration with audiences at home and around the world.”
Marie’s Speaking Categories:
- Business
- Sustainability
- Urban Regeneration
- Entrepreneurs
- Keynote
- Innovation
- Leadership
- Inspirational
- Diversity & Inclusion
- Future of Work
- Resilience and Wellbeing
- Philanthropy & Ethics
You can view Marie’s Chartwell Speakers profile here: https://www.chartwellspeakers.com/speaker/dr-marie-macklin-cbe
‘The Woman we Should all Have Heard More About’
‘The Woman we Should all Have Heard More About’.
You’ve been in this situation many times. An influential leader in business or politics or academia sits across from you in their elegant – but minimalist – office in a chrome and glass four-storey edifice in Glasgow or Edinburgh and begins to tell you about their humble upbringing in an edgy, working class neighbourhood.
Today, Dr Marie Macklin is telling me about her upbringing on Kilmarnock’s Onthank housing scheme. And yes, her business headquarters are indeed somewhat deluxe and the soft furnishings are tidy and tickety-boo. Here’s the thing though: you can see the very same Onthank estate out of her office window and the knobbly sweep of Killie beyond.
Dr Macklin has become one of Scotland’s most important business leaders (and has a wee CBE bearing witness to the fact). And yet, there’s a lingering sense that we should all have heard more about her. She should certainly have a permanent place on the Scottish Government’s prestigious Advisory Council for Economic Transformation. Perhaps they consider Dr Macklin to be a little too independently-minded.
Yes, she led the campaign to transform the sprawling former Johnnie Walker site in Kilmarnock into this grand Halo building, from where her remarkably successful urban regeneration and urban renewal projects have been launched. And yes, she persuaded the American astronaut Dr Kathleen Rubins to take a piece of specially-designed Halo tartan on a jaunt to the International Space Station. And certainly, she’s in constant demand to join boards, pick up awards and lecture international delegates about what can be achieved in breathing life into places that governments consider beyond repair.
Dr Macklin, you see, is a former member of the Conservatives and (worse in this SNP’s eyes) an admirer and former business confidante of Alex Salmond who persuaded her of what independence could achieve for Scotland. Nor has she been slow to offer business advice to the Scottish and UK governments over their joint failure to secure a future for the Grangemouth refinery.
“If I was sitting in front of John Swinney or Keir Starmer, I’d be reiterating to them what’s at stake here. You’ve got energy to think about; you’ve got jobs to think about and you’ve got the future of our young people to think about. Let’s first secure the position by purchasing the site for a pound.
“Sir Keir has promised to put up £200m, well let’s use that as a starter for 10, because he put up £600m for an Ineos factory in Belgium. Let’s get business leaders in from across the region and include the unions and some of the workforce, and then discuss how we use that money now to retain the jobs. And then set about producing a package that’s attractive to other investors and push forward a properly just transition.
“I’d be in favour of retaining it in state ownership for five years with the proviso that you can come out of this and aim at a public/private partnership so that the taxpayers get their money back. That’s the only way it works. “I don’t believe everything should be in public ownership. I believe in rescuing a situation to get it to a strong position that delivers value for money and the heart of the community is protected. There are loads of ways to cut a deal, but you need deal-makers to make it happen.”
I tell her that we’re talking about a government which gave away a massive chunk of our coastline to the richest oil firms in the world for £700m, a fraction of their annual profits. This mob couldn’t sell water in the Sahara. She maintains a diplomatic silence.
Dr Macklin’s been in a similar situation before. In 2009, she produced and developed her ‘Halo’ masterplan for Diageo’s old Johnnie Walker site which she secured for a nominal £1. This was a long and sinewy two-steps-forward-one-step-back process of engaging with East Ayrshire Council and the Scottish and UK governments which lasted until 2022 when phase one of the site regeneration was realised. It’s currently on track to deliver a GDP of more than £200m with the promise of 1500 jobs.
Phase Two, involving an affordable housing development, is happening outside her window as we talk. It builds on her success with her KLIN property business of identifying brownfield sites and decaying listed buildings in disadvantaged communities across Scotland and transforming them into affordable housing and commercial hubs.
My eyes usually mist over when I hear the phrase ‘just transition’. There’s rarely any justice in it for working class communities. She sympathises with my cynicism. “However, I think I can speak from a position of strength on this one,” she says. “I’m sitting on probably the most sustainable project in Scotland. “This building is powered by 175 solar panels. We have a windfarm which is being monitored by Strathclyde University. We’re six years ahead of the Paris Climate Agreement, based on the statistics from promoting the technology here.
“But there must be a common sense aspect too. You cannot shut gas and oil fields when the economy is tanking. You cannot shut the Rosebank and Jackdaw fields and call it Just Transition. The Greens think this is the way to go, but this is a party who’ve constantly failed and cost us millions with their schemes while they were in government, such as the chaotic Deposit Return scheme.
“I don’t have any personal gripes against the individuals concerned but it was good when the SNP finally ditched them as it freed the government up to talk about the bread and butter core policies and issues that matter to economically challenged areas as well as the business community. My dad always told me to stick to what you know. And to me, the Greens know nothing about how to run an economy.”
We discuss the perception in working class communities that the political classes in Scotland have cut them loose and no longer even attempt to engage with them and their everyday concerns. Dr Macklin is on solid ground here too. She was building a successful career advising blue-chip clients in London and New York for one of the UK’s biggest banks before she was struck down by endometriosis, compelling her to return to her home town and a career epiphany. She’s also overcome dyslexia.
She took over her dad’s building firm KILN and began her mission to revitalise neglected, working class communities with a targeted investment strategy combined with a robust and charismatic approach to securing government and state funding. She’s at pains to point out though, that such public funding which helped secure the Johnnie Walker site – though welcome – was not exactly transformational. “Our governing classes are too keen to become involved in issues across the globe that have absolutely nothing to do with them,” she says. “I’m from a working-class background and aspired to better and nicer things and putting wealth back into the system so that others can have them too.
“In Scotland though, there are too many textbook revolutionaries who want you to believe they’re one of the people, yet refuse to give the people any power. They’re actually taking the power away through the people, and that’s unacceptable.”
If you’ve not been to Kilmarnock recently, you might not have seen the Halo building with its signature, circular steel installation atop, signifying not something spiritual or ethereal but simply that good things are happening down underneath. On one level it’s a thrumming hub of creativity supporting start-up businesses with affordable rents and access to expertise and counselling. Larger, quoted enterprises have begun to set up shop here too. Lit up in the early evening, it has a sleek, black aesthetic which would rest easily in the business sectors of London, Tokyo and New York. It’s important to Dr Macklin though, that such a grand building is part of Kilmarnock’s couthier skyline.
“Successful companies know when they walk in here that this is a serious place with a design spec that matches anything they’ll find in the world’s big business centres. But it also tells the community here that they can be part of something big too.“We lost 700 jobs when Diageo moved to Edinburgh and the heart of the town centre was taken away. I want this place to be a community asset, a vehicle for attracting good jobs that pay properly back to my home town.”
Article by Kevin McKenna, The Herald. All pictures by Photographer, Gordon Terris.
On International Women's Day, we Need to Think About Disenchanted Young Men.
On International Women's Day, we Need to Think About Disenchanted Young Men.
Today (Saturday 8th March 2025) marks International Women’s Day, which has become a permanent fixture in the calendar, in this country and around the world; an occasion on which to both celebrate female achievement and to promote the virtues of shattering glass ceilings wherever they are perceived to still exist.
As someone who has forged a successful career in business, I know how tough it can be to make it as a woman. In my own case, that was compounded by the serious health problems I encountered when my debilitating struggle with endometriosis forced me to give up my job in the City of London and return north, taking my career on a different but ultimately rewarding trajectory.
It is an experience which has profoundly shaped me in my personal and professional life and left me with a burning determination to do more to help the countless women afflicted by such conditions, which not only impact physical and mental health but are a huge economic issue.
So, given my own background, and as another International Women’s Day is upon us, I feel more than qualified to opine on not only what it takes to succeed as a woman but also where our attentions should now be focused. However, as I write this to the background strains of Simple Minds, “Don’t You Forget About Me” –one of so many hits which resonated deeply with me as a working-class youngster and formed my own personal soundtrack growing up amid the social and economic turmoil of the 1970s and 80s – I’m prompted to consider just who it is that we are at risk of forgetting.
Because here’s the rub: a whole generation and more later, while so many of our younger people face many of the same challenges, it is perhaps not the fortunes of young women we should be fixated on today. It’s overwhelmingly those of boys and young men.
On just about any metric you care to measure, it is the young males of the Western world who are underperforming, who are worse off emotionally and in too many cases whose needs are being ignored, leading to a toxic cycle of disenchantment and despair.
Let’s address the evidence before us. Which gender leaves education with significantly worse outcomes and prospects? Which does worse when it comes to behavioural issues in childhood, in many cases ultimately spiralling into lifestyles best by serious crime? And which, when it comes to mental wellbeing, fares by far the worst when it comes to the toll of lives lost to suicide?
The answer in every case is of course males. Take the statistics on younger people not in education, employment or training. Already an endemic problem in many UK communities, it has only become worse since the pandemic, but the gender disparity is stark, with a 40 per cent post-Covid rise among males, compared to just seven per cent among females. Meanwhile, boys are twice as likely as girls to face expulsion from school.
The list of statistics goes on and on. And it is a universal phenomenon, by no means confined to the UK and our nearest neighbours. A report from the World Bank in 2022 found that in every region of the world, and in almost every country, boys were faring worse than girls educationally, with all the knock-on effects that has for societies.
In circumstances where those numbers were reversed, with girls and young women beset by a tidal wave of imbalance in their prospects and life chances, an emergency would undoubtedly be declared, task forces convened and the whole might of governments and their associated agencies brought to bear to fix it.
As it is, the travails of boys and young men elicit, at most, a sad but resigned shrug. But the imbalance is now so stark, prolonged and ingrained that it merits the full attention of government.
The reality is that it is not just the current generation of young males who are being failed, and in too many cases abandoned. We are now deep into a multigenerational cycle which has seen too many boys and men left behind.
The Centre for Social Justice recently launched a research project, badged “Lost Boys”, aimed at understanding what lies at the root of male disenchantment. The Lost Boys syndrome was already evident by the late 1970s as males in communities like the one I grew up in saw their chances of employment, opportunity and simple dignity stripped away.
Of course, women have historically been discriminated against and denied opportunity. That has, rightly, been addressed over many decades. And while no one should let down their guard, it is hard to argue that in this country and most Western nations there is not now full equality of opportunity, not only in law, but in practice.
But the consequences of deep-seated male disenchantment are everywhere, socially, economically and politically. Donald Trump sought, with evident success, to tap into that well of masculine despondency when he targeted young men in the recent US election.
Closer to home, our own politicians of all parties would do well to pay attention to that dynamic. That is because fixing the issue will not just bring about renewed hope for those boys and young men who have been left behind – it will also deliver much wider gains in terms of the economy, health, crime rates and family cohesion. When we have a society where young men are active, productive, employed and happy, everyone will benefit, male and female.
So, this International Women’s Day, my plea is to look on it not as a chance to fight old battles but to look forward with hope in the knowledge that true equality means bringing opportunity to everyone.
Let’s not forget the Lost Boys.