Marie’s Column in The Herald | Wednesday 31st December 2025
Scotland faces a turning point as 2025 closes, with the loss of key industrial sites echoing the devastation of the 1980s – and raising urgent questions about energy policy, jobs, and the future of our economy, says Marie Macklin.
As we leave 2025 behind, it risks going down in history as the year in which the final nail was hammered into the coffin of Scotland’s industrial capacity, impacting many of the same communities which have yet to recover from the last wave of manufacturing decline in the 1980s.At the same time, rapid advances are fuelling dreams of how a brave new world of innovation can help change our lives for the better. But while developments in fields like AI hold out hope for transformational change, it is also worth considering just how much we still depend on existing technologies.
More than a generation ago, Scotland was suffering the effects of rapid deindustrialisation as huge swathes of our working infrastructure were shut down or mothballed, most of which was never again put back into productive use.That led to the mass unemployment which impacted working class communities across Scotland’s industrial heartlands.
Mining and steel manufacturing joined the nation’s shipbuilding tradition on the scrapheap of history.As someone who comes from one of those areas, no one needs to explain to me just how devastating the effects of deindustrialisation can be.
It not only leads to despair among individuals, it rips the heart out of entire communities.It is not too far a stretch to suggest that many of the deeply ingrained health and social issues which Scotland faces today, including our shocking record as the drug deaths capital of Europe, can be traced directly or indirectly to that legacy of deindustrialisation.
And it is also worth reflecting upon just how much history repeats itself. Because the last year has seen the shutting down of the Grangemouth refinery, a key piece of Scotland’s industrial infrastructure for fully a century, but which now looks set to become little more than a monument to past glories.Despite recent moves to support continued employment at the plant – as well as UK and Scottish Government plans aimed at transforming the site unto a hub for new, greener energy markets – nothing that has been proposed looks like providing the jobs and economic value at the scale needed to replace what is being lost.
More recently came the news of plans to close the Fife Ethelyne Plant at Mossmorran, another bitter blow to what remains of Scotland’s industrial base.As if all that wasn’t bad enough, the triple whammy has been completed by the continued running down of what remains of our North Seal oil and gas industry.
The failure to remove the Energy Profits Levy in the recent UK Budget makes no sense at all and is another example of a government which appears to pay lip service to the notion of fair and equal treatment for Scotland.
Until UK energy policy is fit for purpose it will not be possible to build an industrial strategy or manufacturing strategy fit for purpose. And to compete with the likes of China, India and the US, we need to look again at making the most of all types of energy at our disposal. That includes a renewed focus by Holyrood to concentrate on the issues that matter most to people – jobs and the economy – rather than other issues.That focus must include fossil fuels whilst we still have such resources to exploit, and until green energy can be produced at sufficient scale.
In the US, energy policy is being taken in that direction through a series of executive orders.Unfortunately, here in the UK politics appears to be stuck on repeat, and the ability to effect the changes we need to see is hampered by short-term political point-scoring.That includes Reform UK, who have yet to prove that any real substance lies behind the presentational glitz.
Reform hopes to make ground amid those same working-class areas left behind since the 80s, including in May’s Holyrood election. However, one thing people in these places do not take kindly to is being taken for granted,So far, Reform have not shown that they have the answers, but there is a glimmer of light for them. Step forward Malcolm Offord, the straight talking, Greenock-raised former Scotland Office minister who recently defected to the party from the Conservatives.It was Offord who delivered, as a UK Government minister, £800 million in Levelling Up funding for deprived communities across Scotland’s central belt.
It is exactly this kind of bottom-up growth and investment that is so badly needed and which all parties should aspire to.I am struck, decades on from the last wave of industrial decline through the 1970s and into the 80s, just how much those of us who were affected by it, depended on community spirit. Despite strikes, surging food prices and power blackouts which left many with no heating and which I remember left me having to do my homework by candlelight, that family and community spirit saw us through.Thankfully, those kinds of privations are, mostly, a thing of the past.
However, that same spirit, including the hugely important role played by women, is needed today in those areas impacted by industrial downturn and job losses.The last year has been a bitter one for those who can remember the last time that waves of closures and redundancy washed over Scotland. Let us hope that 2026 can be a year in which, however slowly and whatever our political differences, that tide can start to be turned.
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