SOUTHWARD DRIFT OF INDUSTRY

Evening Star, Issue 21720, 15 May 1934, Page 4 (Supplement)

SOUTHWARD DRIFT OF INDUSTRY

SCOTTISH DEVELOPMENT URGED The significance to Scotland of the southward drift of British industry was examined by Ur •). A. Bowie, principal of the Dundee School of Economics and Commerce, in a lecture before the economic section of the Glasgow Philosophical Society. Dr Bowie said that the new factories in tlie London area were making consumers’ goods mainly of the luxury type, and were doing no more than developing the type of manufacture traditionally associated with a large centre of consumption like London. More than a third of the new factories were migrants from inner London. There was no evidence that the industries of Scotland were moving south; it would rather seem that the older Scottish industries were shrinking on the spot, and were too debilitated even to migrate. Scottish workers were, however, tending to migrate _ south in search of employment. This was no new phenomenon, for Scotland had for long acted as a nursery of talent. Indeed, there seemed no evidence of any undue migration over the border during the ten-year period 1921-31. Had Scottish industries actually moved south, no doubt workers would have followed in large numbers; but the new industries of Greater London required not the skilled craftsmen of the north, but, in general," unskilled, female, and juvenile labour. It was doubtful bow far Scotland could, or should, attempt to compete in industry of the luxury type. There were forty-five development councils, or committees, in Scotland, and about 300 in England, each attempting to advance the attractions its own area offered, but there was no evidence —at least so far as Scotland was concerned —that they bad bad any considerable influence iii attracting new industries. If Scotland’s industrial life was to be resuscitated Scotsmen must do it—not bv craving the foreigner to come over and help them, but by concentrating attention on the revival of existing industries, their development by research and co-operative effort, by establishing allied or subsidiary industries, by entering the luxury trade through the avenue of their agricultural life, by promoting afforestation, the nursery, horticultural, fruit growing, and poul-

try lines, and by developing an increased tourist traffic through providing, on more generous lines, hostel and hotel accommodation, travel facilities, and sporting arrangements. Practically all these things demanded intense co-operative effort in a land where individualism died hard.