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THERE has been uproar in the press about the closure and lay-offs at
Motorola’s Scottish factory in Bathgate. A total of 3200 people have lost their
job at the factory that opened 11 years ago.

The lay-offs are a catastrophe for the small number of older skilled staff,
some of whom have now been served redundancy four times as various new local
endeavours foundered. Originally, they were coal miners, then they were
reskilled to be line workers at British Leyland’s factory, then retrained as
engineers and eventually employed by Motorola. But most of the workforce is
young, and because of Motorola’s training schemes they are eminently employable
elsewhere. Indeed, many have already found jobs in the Scottish high-tech and
pharmaceuticals economies.

Motorola remains, though, Scotland’s largest, private manufacturing employer.
It set up a factory making semiconductors at East Kilbride, Lanarkshire, 32
years ago, and now employs more than 2000 people there. Software research
followed at Livingston, Lothian, and then mobile phone manufacture in my
Linlithgow constituency.

Hindsight is a marvellous thing and foresight even better. No one had
foreseen just how fast the mobile phone would catch on across the world, or that
the market would grow and become saturated. The boom dramatically turned to bust
in 2000, and mobile phone sales plummeted.

Nine years ago, I was invited to the first Motorola annual get-together
outside the US. It was held at Cliveden, Buckinghamshire, ironically the scene
for some notorious rises and falls in British aristocracy. I formed a high
opinion of the American Galvin family who founded the first Motorola factory at
Libertyville, Illinois, not far from the family headquarters in Chicago in 1928.
I see no reason to alter my opinion of them. Indeed, it is enhanced by the
caring way in which the company is paying four times the statutory redundancy
amount.

The Motorola decision makers are hurt by what they consider to be unfair
criticism in Britain. In fact, their first painful decision was to close the
huge Libertyville plant. The company has shown itself concerned for all its
international divisions—in Scotland, Germany and China. The good name of
their company is extremely important to them, and we should not forget this.

DURING a recent question session on gas prices, Stephen Byers, the Trade and
Industry Secretary, surprised MPs when he said that he and his department are
discussing with the coal industry how Britain can best develop pilot projects in
clean coal technology. Such technology is often claimed to be key to the
redemption of the British coal industry, but all too often a sad thud signals
that, for now, the incumbent government has moved it to the back burner.

Certainly, there were great hopes for it back in the 1960s in the wake of the
report from the committee on coal derivatives chaired by Alan Wilson, then
chairman of Glaxo. And there have been some real successes, such as coal
gasification and combined heat and power. But many hopes remain unfulfilled,
such as fluidised-bed combustion and the production of electricity directly from
hot plasma flames. In all cases the aims include greater efficiency and
preventing the release of sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides that lead to acid
rain.

At the start of the 21st century, it is just as important as when coal was
king that its derivatives and clean technologies should be examined in a
generous and sustained way.