PROTESTS MAY BE ALL WE HAVE LEFT

Dyson Cleans Up • Published 29 Jul 2009 15:55

IT made me laugh - but unfortunately not in a hearty manner.....

The director of CBI Scotland, Iain McMillan is the type of man you would expect to frown upon union action.

But his latest claim that the protests in Kilmarnock will have an adverse effect on foreign investment into Scotland really takes the biscuit.

Of course, that is the real attitude of big business showing itself. They will wax lyrical about the trickle down effect of wealth and bring in some token gesture alluding to community involvement when a company arrives in town.

But when it comes down to it, according to Mr McMillan, the public should simply be impotent bystanders.

"Take what you get be it good or bad", he is basically saying as he claims that there was no reaction like the 20,000 marching through Kilmarnock when Japanese-owned factories closed in other parts of the country.

Of course, there isn't the 150-odd years of history behind those plants, and to ignore this and the central role that some businesses genuinely do play in their community shows a peculiar blindness.

It also betrays exactly what many of the top brass think of their workers.

It would be a gift for them if they had a passive group which simply nodded and went about their work unthinking.

In some places this has become the case - neutered unions and a transient workforce.

But to expect an entire community, which has lived hand in hand with Johnnie Walkers for decades upon decade, to simply shrug its shoulders and say "c'est la vie" is preposterous.

Therein lies the rub unfortunately.

The global economy and local economies no longer tie in, if they ever did.

Even though Diageo made a massive £2b profit last year, they are required to look to better this - to increase their shareholders' dividends.

It is not even a case of the company moving out of Scotland that we are looking at.

Apparently Fife will do well out of Ayrshire's loss as part of this national "restructuring".

Can we look at that and be happy for them while we suffer. I would think that it would be only the most magnanimous person who could do that.

So the protests will continue, despite the ever decreasing chances of a respite.

But to take that one right away, as the CBI would probably encourage, would be the ultimate indignity.

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