Gie's a Job

Bombardier has announced today that 1 in 5 of the jobs it currently offers in Northern Ireland - a thousand jobs altogether - will disappear over the next two years. (I'm sure you will have noticed we only hear from Northern Ireland when there's bad news: The Troubles or problems in the NI assembly).

Cue BBC commentator, who presumably has some expertise in economics: the community is glad that 4 out of 5 jobs will still be there.

I have no expertise in economics but I know that losing 1,000 jobs in a marginal community is a disaster. Every time we worry about losing the last shipbuilding jobs in Scotland right here in Glasgow, it is pointed out that 1,000 breadwinners losing their jobs can mean plunging 4,000 people into poverty in a family: no mortgage payments, no holidays booked, no new clothes, no nights out, no takeaways, no taxis. All this affects local businesses: from the local businesses who provide skilled tradesmen to maintain the yard's facilities, right down to the folk who provide the newspapers and fags at the corner shops and the vans that sell snacks outside the yard...

The same BBC commentator also managed one of those links that have me chucking stuff at the telly: elsewhere, it seems, the news on jobs is much more upbeat.

Elsewhere? Now where would that be? South Wales? The Central Belt of Scotland, the North-east and North-west of England, East Midlands, Northern Ireland? Well, who knows? The BBC news doesn't do analysis any more, although the statistics on new jobs being created are undoubtedly available to anyone who asks for them. But no, the BBC goes for the 'broad sweep' - usually presented to us by people speaking from the South-east of England where there is a huge skill shortage in manufacturing but loadsa jobs if you want to work in an office. So that's all right then.

It's no secret I want independence for Scotland. I don't have any tartan and haggis fantasies. I'm not a nationalist. But I want to live in a country where the most important thing is the health and well-being of the people who live here. And right now, I can only see independence offering any hope.