Jobs lost in Scotland? Yes or No – You Decide

Robin and Adam kindly agreed to debate the case for Yes and No at the Gazette’s Independence Debate in Lanark Memorial Hall on May 26.

They were only too happy to answer questions posed by our readers that we couldn’t quite get through on the night, thanks to a heated meeting which 420 people attended!

So, just a matter of hours before Carluke and Lanark Gazette readers go to the polls to decide on independence, we’re bringing you their responses.

Each hour on the hour, between 8am and 10pm today, we’ll post one of the answers to a question posed by a Gazette reader.

For each question posed, we will give one opinion from the Yes camp and one from the No camp.

The fifth question, with answers from Robin and Adam, asks why Scotland’s young people appear to be moving elsewhere to get jobs.

Question: On the Edinburgh side of Forth an enormous hoarding has appeared depicting two handsome young people of both gender, declaring, ‘Put our jobs at risk - No Thanks!’ and the Better Together logo displayed. This has prompted me to ask what these jobs are? However, I also want to ask why out of 11 graduate sons and daughters of relatives and friends only three work in Scotland – one in medicine, one in education, one in marketing? The other 8 are in England (7) and USA (1) and are mostly employed in computing and engineering. Why is this do you think?

Robin McAlpine, Yes campaign: Britain has built an economy based on speculation and exploitation. It is the second-lowest paid economy among all advanced economies. Scotland suffered particularly badly from deindustrialisation which destroyed good, well-paid jobs and replaced them with zero-hour contracts in burger bars. London sucks up all the well-paid jobs and people have no option but to follow those jobs. The skills of the next generation are always the lifeblood of a nation. Scotland just doesn’t have the powers to build an economy that would create the jobs so they can find good work here.

Professor Adam Tomkins, No campaign: I have written about this at length here: http://notesfromnorthbritain.wordpress.com/2014/05/02/two-positive-cases/