Where's the Reader's Digest Prize Draw When they Need it?

Tom Champagne may have stopped writing the cheques for the Reader's Digest Prize draw in 2003, but the 117 employees of the UK arm of Readers Digest would love to see an envelope landing on its doorstep in Swindon with his cheery signature saying you have won £125m.

For that is the deficit in the Reader's Digest UK's pension fund which has led to the company that first started trading here in 1938 to enter administration. The US parent company is expected to come out of Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection shortly after struggling with interest on its own £1.4bn ($2.2bn) debt.

Troubled Borders

Almost a year ago on the 26th November last year, Woolworths went into administration

Today there is more potentially sad news for the High Street, today there is the first sign that Borders, the bookseller, is faltering. Their website has stopped taking new orders and there are rumours that they do not have enough money to make it through to Christmas.

Borders of course suffers doubly, they are dwarfed as far as High Street bookselling goes by Waterstones' 303 stores to 45. Online they are obviously small fry compared to Waterstones. Of course unlike MFI that also disappeared around the time of Woolworths last year there is no disparity in product. The books that they sell are identical in every way to those of Waterstones or Amazon or any other bookseller of course. What may be their undoing in the matter of economies of scale. They are a smaller purchaser, and therefore seller of the same items and therefore may not be able to get the same deals to undercut in price the other stores.

Of course my most accessible Borders store is in Glasgow, without a car Fort Kinnaird in Edinburgh is bit of a trek, especially when there are three Waterstones either on or close to Princes Street, even Blackstones isn't that difficult to get to from the city centre. Plus I also have another Waterstones in Livingston and one at the Gyle close to where I work. So yes there is a case of near Tesco-like saturation of the local market of the biggest bookseller in the UK.

It may well be a sad day for Borders, and I shall miss being able to browse their shelves when I do get a chance, as every so often I do find something different there, like you do when you visit somewhere that is laid out different from your normal shopping location style.

Tonight Matthew I'm Gonna Be....

....David Kerr candidate for Glgasow North East, John Mason MP for Glasgow East and Stewart Hosie SNP Tresury Spokesman.

Yeah, Tam Smith SNP PPC for Linlithgow and Falkirk East is back at his Rory Bremner act, this time taking on all three without crediting any.

Today he is saying:

"Scotland's banking workers deserves more than a direct line to the breadline. These reforms must not jeapordise jobs in this industry. [Kerr see here]

"As an SNP MP for this area, jobs in Linlithgow & East Falkirk, and in the city of Edinburgh [said about Glasgow North East here*], which have a direct impact on this consitueency[sic], will be my top priority and I will speak up strongly and loudly against any threat to them.

"Since Tuesday's announcement voters on the doorsteps in Bo'ness, where I am campaigning on behalf of Ann Ritchie in the local by-election have been telling me that frontline workers should not pay the price for the problems their bosses caused.

"It is clear the best way to secure a strong future for jobs in West Lothian and Falkirk district in financial services is to send an SNP MP to Westminster to speak up for this constituency and to speak up for our jobs.

"The UK Government is the main owner of these banks and any sell off that puts this constituency's jobs or Scotland's economy at risk is unacceptable." [Compare those two paragraphs with John Mason's words here]

Tam Smith continued [apparently]:

"We must have competition in our banking sector but the potential loss of local branches and uncertainty of ordinary workers in financial services is worrying for many. [Make that Mason]

Retail workers in our banks are already facing up to job losses. A vote for the SNP will tell the UK Government that West Lothian and Falkirk District's workers will not pay for Labour's broken economy." [Make that Hosie]

Let me make it perfectly clear, many people who live in Linlithgow and East Falkirk are affected by banking jobs. Some of those that get on and off the bus with me in Edinburgh Park work in some of the banking offices situated there. Lloyds have been instructed to off load Intelligence Finance which could affect the jobs of 300 people employed at Kirkton Campus in Livingston. The 3,700 frontline bank jobs that are being cut by RBS to take 14% off their staff wage bill will undoubtedly affect others.

However, the SNP had at the initial outbreak of the banking crisis pledged money from a fictious Scottish Bank in some future independent Scotland to deal with this situation. The amount they offered was £50m which now seems small fry compared to what was needed. All the while Vince Cable had been warning that the futures of our banks was not sustainable from years before, though like John the Baptist he was ignored and his pleas almost thrown out into the wilderness.

Sadly we have got to a stage where the overstretched banks may need to offload staff to survive and protect the jobs of the majority. Other industries have also gone through that sort of situation over recent months. Not all have had the benefit of a Government injection of money to see them through so the job losses have happened earlier. Rather that merely speaking 'up strongly and loudly against any threat' of job losses, Linlithgow and Falkirk East needs an MP that will look to the future, getting those who have already faced or will face the inevitable into a job. It means encouraging jobs to come to the region, using the skills that our people have got, and a lot of recent redundancies in the area have been in skilled positions.

According to the West Lothian Courier West Lothian and Falkirk are currently ranked equal 10 out of all the Local Authorities in Scotland when it comes to unemployment. At 4.4% it is 0.4% higher than the Scottish average and 0.2% higher than the UK average. There has currently been a slip to 900 vacancies listed at local job centres, but there are 4,651 people claiming Job Seekers Allowance, that is 5 people for every job that is going.

We need to hear of real action to real jobs into the area. We need to utilise the workforce's that have been or are about to lose jobs from some of the firms locally that have been laying them of. People with IT, production and financial skills are here in our area desperate to get back into work. We need to seek out those green shoots when they do appear and persuade companies as they recover that investment here gives them a skilled and dedicated workforce. Skills in some of the sectors that have been hit are transferable to other sectors, there is more to a financial job that just what it says on the time managers, IT workers, accountants, data analysts etc are also amongst those that will be losing their works. But all will have transferable skills.

So rather than a short-sighted narrow view of Smith-Hosie-Mason-Kerr we need to get others to think outside the box, see what is available, see what they can offer. Just like many of us who graduated in the early 90s had to do we had to be imaginative it what we did next, throwing off our narrow pre-conceived ideas of where we were heading.

*Sadly again on the De Havilland subscription site, but check out the key phrases on google.

What Alex Said and What he Missed Out

Speaking today in Inverness at the start of the SNP conference Alex Salmond tried to do a Gordon Brown and list some achievements. Here is what he said, in brackets is what he missed out.

"Today, I am proud to be addressing you as First Minister on behalf of a successful and popular SNP administration – delivering for the people of Scotland.

"Scotland is a great nation, and is even better with the policies we have already introduced in our first two years – freezing the Council Tax (but he promised to Axe it and replace with a Local Income Tax)), recruiting 1,000 more police (the actual promise was for 1,000 extra on the street, not yet achieved), saving A&E units, restoring free education (they actually promised to dump student debt and have yet to tackle that), and moving quickly in the downturn to implement an economic recovery plan that is protecting 15,000 jobs."

"Admittedly the last point was trying to claim credit for dealing with the unexpected, however 8,500 construction jobs have been lost in Scotland this year may have something to do with the failure to match school building pledges brick for brick. Only schools started by the last administration or through Local authority funding have been completed, none have been started as a result of Parliament funding as promised. Unemployment has also more than doubled in Scotland's rural areas. 700 jobs went at Diageo's bottling plant in Motherwell due to SNP bickering. 700 jobs at the Royal Bank of Scotland, 500 more through Lloyds subsiduaries, 300 redundacnies at Scottish Universities, 850 at Hewlett Packard in Erskine. Even Skills Development Scotland an initiative that should be helping those out of work get back to work laid off 160.

Here in West Lothian 500 jobs are going at Bausch and Lomb’s plant in Livingston due to the SNP's failure to maintain the areas Regional Selective Assistance status. 58 went with the closure of the SEH Europe plant in Livingston, 60 at Russell Europe's distribution plant in Bathgate, HBoS cut many jobs from its IT base in Livingston, 140 Jobs at Sun Microsystems in Linlithgow.

Now I've not been keeping count and I could go on, but I reckon I'm pretty sure I'm over 15,000 right there, all with in the last 12 months or so.

Politicians Letting Down West Lothian Workers

The CEO of West Lothian Chamber of Commerce has slated local and national politicians in light of the recent announcement that Bausch & Lomb's plant shutting down in Livingston. He said:

"It is disappointing that during recent years Alistair Darling, Iain Gray, Jim Devine, Margaret Hodge and Michael Connarty all had opportunities to influence changes that might have helped businesses like Bausch & Lomb to stay in West Lothian.

"The consequence of their inaction is that Ireland is now perceived internationally as a more attractive business location."

He is furious that the politicians haven't done enough to protect the regions eligibility under the Regional Selective Assistance programme (RSA). The area had maintained RSA status until last year, i.e. just before the world was thrown into recession, when European officals decided to reduce the number of Scottish areas eligible. Firms in such areas can claim up to 35% grants towards investment. It should be noted that Bausch & Lomb's other European plant in Waterford does now benefit from RSA status that the Livingston plant no longer does. Chamber President Duncan M Walker said:

"The factory is closing not because they're failing to produce innovative products, it's because the location in Ireland has RSA – Bausch & Lomb can get more activity while reducing costs. If we'd had more support from the people David McDougall mentioned, we might have retained the status which would mean Bausch & Lomb might have stayed."

Five years ago the company had won the Scottish Engineering Award for its work with "world-class technologies". As company Chairman Gerald M Ostrov said the closure was "by no means a reflection on our employees' professionalism, dedication, or efforts", but rather a purely financial decision.

Is it possible that Westminster and Holyrood could have done more to help maintain these highly trained, technical and skill jobs stay in the region? The writing was already on the wall even when the RSA was in place with firms like Motorola and NEC and others that formed the once renowned Silicon Glen pulling out to focus on other production plants. The area had been suffering even before the latest economic difficulties. The various industrial campuses around Livingston could become somewhat more of a ghost town if companies cannot be persuaded to stay in the area.

Supermarkets, Booze, SNP and the Border

Way back on 18 June over at Jeff's blog he rejected my comment that the SNP price per unit policy would lead to booze drives over the border to England. Something I'd earlier that day covered in more detail here.

Well it appears that the Supermarkets themselves are thinking of ways to circumvent just such a proposal. ASDA chiefs say there is nothing to stop them setting up distribution centres south of the Border so that online Scottish shoppers can pay English prices. That could be worrying for the workers at the supermarkets distribution centres that currently hug the M8 between Edinburgh and Glasgow.

So while the SNP are salivating over the possibility of declaring internet independence by changing Government address from .uk to .sco the same world wide web also is a reminder that the border with Englandshire is only about 70 miles away from our two major cities. So making too radical a change in Scotland can affect commerce, jobs etc by companies merely moving that short hop.

Toffee Makers Chewing Over Closure

Millar McGowan with factories at Broxburn and Stenhousemuir is facing to possibilty of closure with the potential loss of 149 jobs.

The makers of Pan Drops, Wham and Highland Toffee bars which has a history going back to 1884 from the John Millar and Sons and McCowan's companies, went into recievership again yesterday. The company has been sadly no stranger to financial difficulties having already escaped recievership last year. However, this latest blow is as a result of the new firm being unable to resturcture its costs.

Unless someone steps forward to buy the company the employees may be laid off and production ceased in the next few weeks.

Sadly for many Scots the company also produces the Irn Bru Bars.