New Statesman Scotland
"The Song of the Clyde" has been a plaintive dirge for many years. The days when the shipbuilders of Glasgow, Clydebank, Greenock, etc, made something like 25 per cent of the world's tonnage are long gone. Only a handful of hard-pressed yards remain. The competition from Japan, South Korea, eastern Europe and the hyper-smart Germans has proved too much. All that the men of the Clyde can do is hope to persuade the government to keep them going by shifting a few military orders their way. But a government thirled to the ideas of Adam Smith might (in fact, will) find this difficult.
There is more to economic theory than Adam Smith, however. This diary would like to point Gordon Brown in the direction of another 18th-century Scots economist - one whose work Adam Smith so feared that he refused to mention him in The Wealth of Nations. His name was Sir James Steuart, he was born in Edinburgh in 1701, and, despite his enthusiasm for the Jacobite cause, his great opus An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Oeconomy (1767) is at least 100 years ahead of its time. Long before Karl Marx and Maynard Keynes, the old Jacobite was advocating state intervention and a modern mixed economy.
Steuart saw unemployment as a "breach of contract and an abuse"; he argued that public money should be (judiciously) spent on struggling industries to "keep that industry alive" and that taxes were good, as they "promote industry in consequences of their being expended by the state: that is by increasing demand and circulation".
Investment in infrastructure, he wrote, was always better than consumerism.
Margaret Thatcher and the Tories made much of Adam Smith. Whether or not they understood him, the result was a great deal of consumerist talk. If the last quarter of the 20th century was dominated by the sage of Kirkcaldy, perhaps the first quarter of the 21st will belong to the Jacobite wizard of political economy. The shipyards of the Clyde and the car factories of the English Midlands may yet survive.
Is this diary alone in feeling depressed by the news that the great model railway builder Hornby Dublo is in trouble? Is it possible that the creators of the awesome "00" gauge electric train sets, the aspiration of generations of British ten-year-olds, is finding it hard to survive? It seems so. Despite shedding scores of jobs a few years ago (and moving some of the work from Margate to China), the 100-year-old company is still struggling. At the end of last year, Hornby Dublo's first-half, pre-tax profits had slumped by 40 per cent to £253,000. And unlike the bigger-gauge railway builders and operators (Railtrack , ScotRail , GNER, etc), it cannot reach for the public purse to keep its rolling stock rolling or its permanent way clear of leaves.
The trouble, it seems, lies with Kids Today. It appears that Kids Today are no longer enchanted by the creations of that great Liverpudlian, Frank Hornby. His clockwork train sets, 00 gauge electric train sets and Meccano construction sets are languishing on the toyshop shelves. Kids Today prefer to sit zombie-like in front of cathode-ray tubes (or liquid crystal display screens) manipulating patterns of electrons run on software devised in Japan and America. The flicker is not good for their eyes. The radiation is not good for their health. The incessant over- excitement is not good for their emotional state. And, just as important, what is it all doing to their sense of how things work? What do they see of how things are put together? Kids Today have no idea what they are missing.
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