Support for workers keeps disappearing when the news moves on

Today the Scotsman reveals that the UK Government has admitted that none of the £200 million announced for Grangemouth to help mitigate the closure of the refinery has actually been spent. This follows a regular pattern in which governments take an interest in workers for just as long as they are in the news before returning their attention to investors.

This inaction contrasts starkly with the effort expended on winning the political narrative on Grangemouth. The SNP tried to present it as a betrayal of Scotland, Labour wanted to be seen to be on the workers' side and keep the unions happy, and Reform and the Tories tried to turn it into a culture wars issue about net zero.

That level of effort is not readily visible in terms of what has been done since. The UK Government seems to have got what it wanted out of this by announcing the £200 million and does not seem to have been in any rush to spend it. But it is hardly like there is a flurry of activity being funded by the Scottish Government either.

Its most up-to-date package of measures opens with a grant of £41,000 to a trade union. As a general rule, governments do not bother to press release sums that low – it is barely a staff salary. The rest of its package offers reason for scepticism.

For example, the £11.4 million invested in renewable projects in the area looks like money which was already being spent or likely to be spent anyway. A total of £1 million of Scottish money was dedicated to 'skills', with another £1 million from the UK. This does not feel transformational.

And there is a vague promise of a round £10 million of investment from Scottish Enterprise in “new projects”. Whether or not anyone will remember to go back in a couple of years and find out what those were is questionable.

The point is that making a big fuss about supporting displaced workers and then following it up with only the vaguest and most cursory action is a cross-party business. There was much fuss made in public about supporting the workers at Longannet when the power plant closed down and the Scottish Government announced a “£100 million economic stimulus package”.

But on closer examination, that was Scotland-wide (and seems to have been more press release than reality) and in reality what Longannet got was £2.7 million for an “enterprise hub … and sub-regional business park to help foster economic resilience”. That is a mismatch in words and actions. The local authority calculated that the bare minimum needed to match other similar deals was £9 million. They did not get it.

And we have now had 20 years of promises about ensuring a 'just transition' away from oil and gas in the North East and it is hard to argue that promise has been delivered. The most recent interventions from the Scottish Government have been to demand tax cuts for oil corporations, nothing to do with a just transition at all.

The rest is the usual – a fund of £17 million you can submit a bid to, with 60 per cent being for businesses rather than workers and some funding for poverty alleviation. That, at best, is 'unjust transition mitigation'. None of it is the industrial and workforce strategy it claims it is.

The problem is a simple one; corporate interests have lobbyists pushing government and senior decision-makers to act in their interests every hour of the day. Scotland's workers do not have that – at times the trade unions have been as bad at making 'transition' mean 'don't transition, sustain' as the politicians. Certainly no-one is really acting for the communities in this.

We have a political system which is far too weighted to the interests of money and not weighted enough in favour of the interests of communities and workers. The results of government decisions prove it.

Amazon only has to ask to be given £6.3 million to build a warehouse (which is now owned in a tax haven). A questionable industrialist can have dinner with a government minister and gain a remarkable half billion pound public guarantee for an aluminium plant which was little more than a sketch on the back of an envelope.

But when these powerful business figures leave the playing field, political interest in those who are left behind is a fraction of the political interest in those who are leaving. The only way to deal with industrial decline is an industrial policy, and the only way to make communities matter is to give them stronger voices. Scotland needs a change in economic policy and a decentralisation and democracy agenda.

The Programme for Government has offered the opposite – more foreign corporate ownership and further centralisation. The UK Government may have let Grangemouth down, but it is at least making much more positive noises about decentralisation of power now. The Scottish Government may find itself outflanked.