ALTHOUGH I was born and bred in Scotland I have lived and worked in Norway for the past 25 years. However I keep abreast with events and I visit Scotland four or five times a year. And every time I came back here there is invariably a great stushie in the papers. Some new tale of woe about how the Koreans, the Japanese, the English, the Americans, the Norwegians, or whoever, have done the dirty on us Scots again and pulled their investment out of Scotland leaving hundreds or thousands jobless once again.
One time before it was Mitsubishi in Haddington. This time it is Kvaerner in Govan and Viasystems in Galashiels and Selkirk.
And the cry is always the same. Why do these perfidious foreigners not stick around and provide us loyal, steadfast pliable Scottish scudges with secure, long-term, pensionable, trade-union-approved jobs? And the reason is always the same too. These foreigners do not stick around precisely because they are foreigners.
A Norwegian company, like any company worth the name, is there primarily to make money, not to provide Scots with jobs. If Kvaerner find a better way of making more money elsewhere or of reducing their costs by abandoning Scotland then why should they not do so? They are Norwegians, not Scots, and owe no particular loyalty to this country.
In Norway where Kvaerner are also withdrawing from the shipbuilding business the first reaction of the affected yard and the unions was to form a committee to buy the yard and take over the running. The first reaction in Scotland all too often seems to be to look for a new foreigner.
Scotland's dependence on the much-vaunted ''inward investment'' programme is so ingrained that it seems that no-one in Scotland has the confidence in themselves to take the risk involved in taking over a well-established company.
Even although Govan has decades more experience of shipbuilding than any foreigner around, it seems our belief in ourselves is non-existent. Our faith in the foreign investor and the inward investment programme on the other hand is unshaken. And despite our experiences with Haddington, Govan, and Galashiels.
Far better to employ a gaggle of civil servants in the Enterprise companies to fish for ''inward investment'', using the taxpayers' money as incentive. And if they fail to attract another 100 scudgy jobs sticking together circuit boards for some obscure ''casino capitalist'' who disappears after sucking the country dry of subsidies, who cares? There will always be a new taker to promise another 100 jobs as long as the Enterprise company makes it worth his while.
There is no word in Norwegian for ''inward investment'' and we have no agency/office for promoting it either. Noway gets little inward investment and Norway is about the only country in Europe which has no large Japanese investment.
Norway does not need inward investment because Norway depends on Norwegians to do the investment. Not foreigners - however alluring and well-meaning they may appear. This attitude does much to explain why Norway is not a member of the European Community.
The solution to Scotland's ills is not economic. It is not in sending more delegations to Kuala Lumpur or Taiwan to beg for investment. Nor is it even in building more Civil Service-run business advisory centres to teach aspiring businessmen to do accounts.
It is more radical than that and it is political. Until the average Scotsman and Scotswoman come to understand that, in the final analysis, we are on our own and that we can depend on no-one but ourselves to secure our future, then the Scots shall continue to witness the sort of disappointment and disillusionment which Kvaerner's decision brought to Govan last week.
In 1905, 99.2% of the Norwegian population voted for complete independence from Sweden. They have not done too badly out of it, as, according to the World Bank, Norway now has the third highest gross national product per capita in the world (after Switzerland and Japan) and 74% higher than that of the United Kingdom.
If the experience of Scotland's nearest foreign neighbour is anything to go by, a little more independence would do us no harm at all. It might also imbue in us the useful belief that it is Scottish investment rather than foreign investment which will provide the safest workplaces.
Michael Fergus,
Elisenbergveien 14,
0265 Oslo, Norway.
April 23.
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