Post-industrial society ‘has resulted in national fiscal enfeeblement’

I WAS impressed with your refreshing leader comment encouraging engineering as a career for our young people (“Education must meet the needs of industry”, The Herald, February 19). I consider it is important that we accept this to be inclusive for all levels of employment in this stimulating field.

Most people would agree, I expect, that as you suggest, “learning for learning’s sake is a fine principle” . However, I feel that in this context it perhaps exposes that for many of our young people going to university, the process has started resembling the same genre in life as Munro bagging – but without appreciating the uplifting splendour of the hills. The conferring of a degree too often seems to mean that a personal box has been ticked rather than feeling that capabilities to both contribute creatively to society and also to individual growth have been enhanced. I believe that young people appear too often nowadays, after university, to seek jobs rather than careers in helping build Scotland’s wealth and it is seldom their fault.

It seems to me that our reliance on a post-industrial service-based economy has resulted in national fiscal enfeeblement. Keith Anderson, the head of Scottish Power – to whom your leader refers – reminded us himself in your business section that his firm is owned by the Spanish group Iberdrola (“Energy firm warns of skills shortage”, The Herald, February 19). Indeed, both Glasgow and Aberdeen airports are owned by a Spanish/Australian consortium. This illustrates the lamentable price we have very probably paid for marginalising Scottish manufacturing and engineering instead of maintaining them as core indigenous wealth creators and employers.

If my grandparents were alive today they would hardly believe that present-day giant cruise ships are usually built in Finland, Germany or France and never in Scotland. I consider that we threw away our heavy engineering capacity through lack of commitment to capitalintensive industry when it became clear that there were much easier and less risky ways to make money. It is not too late to reconsider our national priorities for investment and incentives to encourage much more extensive opportunities in engineering as alternatives to employment for our young people in cafes, shops and hotels.

The young people we need for this renaissance must include very well trained, problem-solving engineers. Bill Brown, 46 Breadie Drive, Milngavie.