Was there ever a serious attempt to save Alexander Dennis?

Common Weal has been tracking the demise of Scotland's only bus manufacturing company since the issue first emerged. What we have tried to do throughout is to highlight the argument that this was not inevitable and that 'managing decline' is not the only option.

Today we must surely be starting to reach the end of this story. The Economy Minister Stephen Flynn is 'disappointed' that the furlough scheme that was introduced with the stated aim of providing a stop-gap solution which the now Canadian-owned company came up with a rescue plan didn’t actually result in a rescue plan.

At the time we were sceptical – we could not see that more laissez faire policies (give them some money and go away and hope it is OK) were going to work. Indeed it was hard not to get at least some sense that the purpose of this scheme was only to delay news of what was viewed as an inevitable failure until after the election.

That is certainly what the opposition are saying, and it is hard entirely to disagree. The furlough scheme was sold as if it was a game-changing intervention which had saved jobs, but there was no way to see how delaying a decision would change the decision.

We have been making the case from the beginning that this is a classic example of where an industrial strategy works but a neoliberal laissez faire approach does not. Even in theory it is hard to see how the latter was supposed to work here or whether anyone really thought it would.

At the heart of this isn't that a viable business couldn't have been sustained in Scotland but that a company operating in multiple countries benefited from concentrating its production. There is no sense that the company seems to have wavered from this position at any point. Even the plan agreed as part of the furlough scheme seemed more like a statement of hope than expectation.

Certainly it ought to have been clear long before this point that 'success' did not seem to be the trajectory which was being followed. The decisions made by the company in this case were shaped by a number of factors which the furlough scheme fundamentally did not change. It was, in effect, a cash gift to keep workers paid while the company was asked to go away and think about the same decisions in exactly the same context but come up with a different answer.

Unsurprisingly, it did not and the whole thing has failed. So when the Cabinet Secretary says he is “disappointed”, it is difficult to see how he and his predecessors could really have been expecting a different outcome. We predicted this would happen from the beginning and it seems unlikely the Scottish Government's officials didn't.

If they did they had options. They could have looked at the kinds of alternatives set out here in a Common Weal response – the use of 'smart', strategic public procurement practices to sustain orders and drive innovation, a decision to see this as 'not just another company' but a national strategic asset, the linking of the company to a green reindustrialisation strategy and seek some form of domestic ownership buy-out and support it through the National Investment Bank and Scottish Enterprise.

But there seems either to be a capacity limit or an ideological block to taking this kind of action. Scotland's agencies (particularly Scottish Enterprise) have an extremely ideological view of what is good for Scotland and what economic doctrine will achieve it. Alexander Dennis looks like another victim.

It is not easy to decide what is most concerning in this affair – the fact that officials and politicians seem to have known this wouldn't work and were not concerned enough about that fact to change course and try something else, or that they knew this wouldn't work and were happy to use public money to cover it up not because there was a realistic chance of saving the plant but purely for reasons of political expediency.

What is concerning is that we have somewhat been normalised to this in Scotland. There are many countries where the loss of remaining large manufacturing companies with a long history is seen as a national crisis that requires serious, concerted action and Scotland doesn't not seem to be one of them.

And there is a worrying concern that government is now being run mainly on the basis of PR rather than policy, that the appearance of something happening is more important than evidence that it is really happening.

What is not in doubt is that there looks to be little or no future for Alexander Dennis in Scotland in any form we would recognise. This should stimulate a major debate about what on earth happened, but will probably fade into the background noise of daily business failure in Scotland.