As the boats go out

Keith Anderson is talking animatedly about his father, and without pausing for breath he whips out his mobile and punches in a number. "Dad, it's me - when did you work at the shipyard?"

Anderson junior has followed in his father's footsteps, but not in the timeworn Govan way, where apprenticeships were handed down through the generations. His father was the first IT manager at Govan shipyard during the 1970s, overseeing the installation of automated cutting machines and an IBM main-frame the size of a pocket battleship.

Now Keith Anderson is back in the same area, playing his own part in the information revolution by designing and manufacturing - yes, manufacturing - wireless communication systems. His two-month old company, Boston Networks, has just been short-listed for a Glasgow small business award.

Next door to Boston is MJM, the padded bra firm that has been forging ahead in a very different kind of silicone valley. Last month its 29-year-old founder Michelle Mone went to Florida to pick up her award as international young business achiever of the year.

Unsurprisingly, neither Anderson nor Mone were interviewed by BBC foreign correspondent Fergal Keane, whose frontline dispatch comes from Govan tonight. Govan, contends Keane, is part of a "forgotten Britain", and its fortunes follow an imaginary graph linked to the decline of shipbuilding on the Clyde. He employs every trick of the TV journalist's book to suggest a place on its knees, abandoned by government to the uncertainties of the unfashionable metal-bashing market.

There is even a shot of a suitably feral-looking dog nosing through ripped bin bags tossed onto the streets. You don't have to be a media studies graduate to know a visual cliche when you see one. The day I visited Govan last week, I saw a council bloke in a green reflective tabard painstakingly picking up litter. Funnily enough, he didn't make it into Keane's film either.

Nor did the aromatherapy garden, with the subtle fragrances of feverfew and lemon balm. "It's a little oasis in the middle of Govan," says Linda Entwistle of the mental health project which planted the garden last year. The ex-shipyard welder who fabricates pieces of public art isn't in Keane's film, and nor is the extraordinary construction that will soon house an Imax cinema.

Come back in a year and you would likely see the distinctive yellow-and-blue facade of an Ikea store and the BBC's purpose-built headquarters taking shape. Less visible, but perhaps of greater local importance, will be a #1 million project to lay 28 kilometres of underground fibre-optic cable to give small businesses high-speed net access.

This is the Govan that Ron Culley, the sharp-suited head of the local enterprise company, wants to show me as we cruise around in his silver machine (Daewoo: flash for less cash.) "You have to ask if it is more likely that any shipyard will open or a dot.com revolution will sweep through here," says Culley as we drive down what used to be the notorious Wine Alley, home of the worst housing in Govan. In its place are functional sheds - but fully let functional sheds.

We visit two company bosses with their roots in old Govan - both claim to have played football with local hero Alex Ferguson. Now both are trying, in their own way, to embrace the technological revolution which means that yard jobs, at best, will only ever be one part of a diverse economy. Dan Whitelaw makes gas chambers for farmed salmon; Ian Gray is producing internet-compatible touchscreens. Like I say, diverse.

They may be mere green shoots in an undoubtedly desolate cityscape, but such positive images presumably did not fit with the tried and trusted narrative about proud men of the Clyde fighting for the job that stands between them and permanent unemployment.

"I used to follow the progress of the Kvaerner story from London," writes Keane in A Stranger's Eye, the book that accompanies his television series. "Not that it made much news in the capital. The story fitted into an outdated template."

Having watched Keane's film about the Govan workers' agonising wait to hear about their future, one has to wonder who is using the outdated template. Everything from the single mother juggling catalogue debts to shots of abandoned supermarket trolleys is used to set the threatened job losses against a background of despondency.

These images are easy to find in Govan, as in every other city in Britain, Europe and very probably the Western world. The point is that suggesting a direct causal relationship with the shipyard's fortune distorts the true picture, which is far more complex.

Whatever you feel about the accuracy of unemployment statistics based on benefit claimant numbers, Govan is better off than many other parts of Glasgow. Ten years ago it had the second-highest rate of unemployment - close to 30% - of any council ward in the city; now it is not even in the bottom 10. The most optimistic set of figures published in January showed that unemployment had dropped to below 10% for the first time in decades.

Even allowing for the boosterism of local enterprise executives like Culley who are paid to talk up the area, can there really be nothing in Govan without the yards, as Keane seems to suggest? Or has he been enlisted in the propaganda war which mythologises Clyde shipbuilders to secure political patronage? "You have to wonder if it's not the done thing to say shipbuilding shouldn't be supported," says Keith Anderson. "The question has to be asked whether it's time to move on."

To be absolutely clear, Anderson does not advocate closing the yards - and nor does anyone else I speak to during my short odyssey through Govan. There is no doubt that if the yard had not been saved by GEC Marconi and then BAe Systems, the area would have been badly affected. No-one wants those jobs to disappear.

Keane is right that people in Govan deserve better, but surely wrong that the yard offers the only opportunity to earn a decent living. For one thing, very few Govan people actually work in the yard, a fact rarely mentioned in portrayals of this supposedly tight- knit shipbuilding community. "I can't remember the last time I dealt with a welder or a riveter," says John Daly, a local training advisor.

Of the 100 or so men who lost their jobs in the recent redundancies, only 15 were from Govan. To the families of these men, wherever they live, this is a disaster. What is rather disingenuous is the way the supposed dependence of an entire community on shipbuilding is used as a political lever every time the yard is threatened with closure.

You can't blame Jamie Webster, the charismatic union convener who plays a starring role in Forgotten Britain, for seizing any propaganda opportunity that will stave off jobs. However, you can question whether a BBC correspondent of Keane's experience should unquestioningly offer that opportunity.

Similarly, there is no doubt that Govan's shipyard has a political significance that goes beyond the jobs at stake. It is a totem for industrial Scotland.

It would be fair to say that Martin Davidson, head of property at Scottish Enterprise Glasgow, is politically correct when it comes to Govan. But he does concede that "shipbuilding is a very emotive issue. There are decisions which are political which are not for us to take".

The idea that yard workers symbolically represent the whole community has more to do with nostalgia than hard economic fact. The other oft trotted-out truism is that the yard supports far more people than just the shipbuilders. Of course it does - but not many are in Govan. A recent survey by Glasgow City Council estimated that 2.5% of workers employed by Kvaerner subcontractors lived in the area.

But surely some of their wages must be spent in Govan? Yes - some. Hardev Singh, proprietor of Harry's Hardware Store, has lived in the area for 18 years. He sells household wares and "fancy goods", but business is not exactly booming. "We had quite a few shops," he recalls.

Singh reckons 10% of his trade comes from yard workers; the rest are locals. The real pain has been inflicted by a new Asda and the giant Braehead retail park. Harry has problems, but it is just plain wrong to say that closure of the yard is the biggest threat to his livelihood.

At Govan Cross, the statue of William Pearce, local Victorian worthy and MP, stands guard outside Brechin's Bar, which displays the ubiquitous sign in Labour colours which proclaims: "We support the Govan shipyard". In the public bar I meet a community activist, who prefers anonymity despite toeing the party line.

"This government doesn't seem to have a policy for manufacturing industry," says my unshaven source. "What we are facing is the whole place closing down and the heart being ripped out of it. It's a dead community economically."

Really? Are Govan people genetically programmed to build ships and nothing else? Or have they been imprisoned by an image from the past, assisted by nostalgists like Fergal Keane who would rather retell old stories than find new ones that don't fit the template? A job in the shipyard is no longer a birthright, if it ever was, but still the argument persists.

As Alan Davidson, a respected community leader who worked in Govan for many years, says: "I think possibly that card has been played too long."

Fergal Keane's Forgotten Britain, Sunday, BBC1, 10.20pm

Copyright 2000
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