BATHGATE no more. Linwood no more. Methil no more. Irvine no more. The elegy the Proclaimers sang to a lost industrial Scotland remains as haunting and evocative as ever. It conjures up the anguish and anger we all felt as a heartless, foreign Thatcherism destroyed the Scottish economy.

It served as the anthem for those of us who decided to resist, to take back ownership and control of our country and our lives from foreign multinationals. And from governments in London that refused to lift a finger to save jobs, giving the excuse that “free markets” left to themselves were a better way of running the economy than conscious, planned human intervention.

This week there was a wee story in the media about the BiFab construction yard in Methil, that brought the Proclaimers song back to mind. BiFab makes the huge steel jackets that anchor offshore wind turbines to the sea floor. Currently, a number of giant offshore wind farms are being built in the North Sea as part of the turn to renewable energy we need to halt climate change. Billions are being invested.

This new industry should be the opportunity to turn Scotland into the Saudi Arabia of green energy – a dubious phrase originally patented by Alex Salmond.

BiFab is in the news not because it has won orders but because it hasn’t. BiFab is going the way of the BMC lorry plant at Bathgate, of the Chrysler car plant at Linwood, and of all the other ghosts of Scotland’s industrial past. For despite there being a bonanza of demand on Scotland’s doorstep for the infrastructure to enable this vast new renewables industry, actual manufacturing is being done elsewhere – mostly in China and the Gulf. Soon it will be BiFab no more.

I last wrote about BiFab in these pages only last month when the company lost out in an order for turbine jackets for the big Seagreen project being built for SSE, a Swiss-registered energy company that pretends to be Scottish.

I was a bit surprised my story did not get the usual internet traction despite my exposing the fact that BiFab had been undercut by a dubious US contractor called Fluor (which works for the Pentagon), and a state-owned Chinese sidekick that takes advantage of operating out of a low-tax port outside of Hong Kong.

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The rest of the order has gone to a company called Lamprell, which is based in the low-tax United Arab Emirates where striking is illegal. Lamprell admits to being in serious financial difficulty and is desperate to acquire any contracts it can get by selling cheap. In other words, BiFab has been undercut by unfair competition.

Now BiFab has run into difficulties with its only remaining prospect for work – building eight turbine jackets for use in the Neart Na Gaoithe (NnG) offshore wind project being developed by the French, state-owned energy company EDF. It appears BiFab lacks the working capital to complete the construction work and blames the Scottish Government for withdrawing guarantees that would facilitate getting a bank loan.

The Scottish Government comes into the picture because it rescued BiFab from administration in 2017, injecting £34 million to keep the company afloat. The rescued BiFab was then sold to a Newfoundland firm called DF Barnes in 2018, though hundreds of jobs were still lost. The Scottish Government provided DF Barnes with a £15m loan facility as working capital.

However, the pandemic has delayed work on the NnG field (at least that’s the EDF excuse) and BiFab’s cash has run out. This is a complicated tale, and I don’t think we should simply take DF Barnes’s pleadings at face value. For starters, DF Barnes had no experience in either the renewables industry or the North Sea.

It is a regional player in the Canadian oil industry that thought – naively – that it could buy its way cheaply into Europe. The Scottish Government was anxious to get out of direct responsibility for BiFab and mistakenly saw the Newfoundlanders as a godsend.

DF Barnes was the wrong company at the wrong time.

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INFORMATION on the financial state of DF Barnes is hard to come by. That’s because it is owned by a Canadian private equity fund called JV Driver, which has investments in car dealerships, insurance, hotels, property development and construction. That seems a rather eclectic portfolio to me – suggestive that the management is more concerned with quick returns than patient investment.

Some reports put JV Driver’s annual revenues at more than $200m, so I guess it could afford to borrow working cash for BiFab without a Scottish Government guarantee. However, that does not excuse the Scottish Government for making lame excuses about why it can’t inject investment cash into BiFab or the renewables industry.

The Scottish Government’s ostensible reason for not providing BiFab/DF Barnes with financial guarantees is that this constitutes illegal state aid under EU rules. You are thinking what I’m thinking: the UK has left the EU. However, the original EU-UK political declaration that governs Brexit commits Britain to meet state aid rules. The EU is also holding out for strict state subsidy red lines in its current trade negotiations with the Tory Government.

That said, you can always drive a coach and horses through the EU state subsidy rules, as the Germans and French do every day. If the Scottish Government provided guarantees to BiFab the worst that could happen would be a reference to the Court of Justice and a ruling sometime at the end of the decade. By which time BiFab would be successful or long gone. I suspect the Scottish Government is actually virtue signalling to the EU that it will be a good, compliant member after independence.

Here’s the rub: massive infrastructure investments are always too risky for private investors. Such is the nature of capitalism. Which is why electricity generated in the North Sea is subsidised by the British consumer and taxpayer under rules laid down by the UK Government. And why the companies supplying the kit that BiFab has been excluded from manufacturing are only able to do so because they get tax concessions from China and the Emirates. And why EDF is owned by the French Government.

Today, Denmark is home to a company called Orsted, which is actually the world’s largest developer of offshore wind power. The firm accounts for around 29% of global installed capacity. Surprise: Orsted is majority owned by the Danish Government. So much for state aid rules. The Danish energy ministry is now planning to build an artificial island to gather power from next-generation offshore wind farms. The energy flowing into this hub will be used to crack hydrogen from seawater, to power aircraft, ships and factories. That’s vision.

Had BiFab been closed under a Thatcher government, SNP members would be picketing, and the Proclaimers would be adding “BiFab no more” to the chorus of Letter From America. Fortunately, the SNP have a degree of state power now, even if it is limited. Let’s use that power to save BiFab but also to create a public stake in the offshore industry, via the new Scottish National Investment Bank. And to hell with bogus state aid rules.