ANYWHERE else the BiFab news would be across every front page.

But somehow a deal that saves fabrication firm BiFab, hundreds of skilled jobs at its Methil, Burntisland and Arnish yards and Scotland’s capacity to build the kit needed to realise our destiny as the Saudi Arabia of renewables, only crept into the nether regions of the news (this paper excepted).

Of course, new Canadian owners DF Barnes still have to win contracts. Of course, the Scottish Government’s role as minority shareholder doesn’t guarantee that will happen. And naturally, support for BiFab has prompted calls for similar intervention to help other struggling companies.

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But with luck, and a renewed sense of purpose, the BiFab deal could be a game-changer for Scotland. Not just because it means Scotland retains the home-grown capacity to build and install the engines, turbines, rigs and support vessels needed by our vital marine, renewables and energy sector and end a situation where almost every wind-farm uses turbines manufactured elsewhere.

But because BiFab’s resurrection could be a watershed. It could be the moment Scots start to believe in the importance of engineering and manufacture again – the moment we consciously reverse the de-industrialisation of Scotland that began after the war and was dramatically hastened by Margaret Thatcher. Of course, Scots rejected Maggie time and again at the ballot box. But somehow we came to believe her siren message that making stuff is not where the future of Scotland lies.

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So we’ve had 30 years of a non-industrial policy reflecting the priorities of the City of London, which prefers to ship its money abroad and invest in British companies making profits by delivering public services on the cheap. We’ve been brainwashed into thinking that making things is a last century activity – but take a look around. None of our European neighbours thinks this way.

Paul Sheerin, chief executive of the Scottish Engineering Federation worked for an Italian company for five years and recalls: “They had an instinct to buy local and build local. Any good news story about engineering or manufacturing was a front-page story. Here only bad news makes the headlines.

“I really don’t know why there’s such a big difference – but it doesn’t help our young people to think about engineering as a career and choose STEM subjects at school.”

He’s right – this unquestioned presumption that things can only be built properly elsewhere is massively damaging to our economy and cultural confidence. Every constructed thing was once an idea. Turn that around and you realise that every unconstructed thing is an idea abandoned. Ultimately, the failure to realise ideas, to build things, smashes up an economy and a society faster than anything else.

On Eigg for example, it’s taken 20 years of skill-raising and confidence building for a generation of young builders to start using the native wood supplies that have always existed there – cutting costs and build-time dramatically. In the past experts worried that Scottish wood was less dense and therefore less strong than wood from slow-growing trees further north. Now native island wood is finally being used for new build homes – the beams are simply cut thicker.

Another Highland builder told me: “When I first started building houses there were still a few local sawmills in Argyll. They have now all gone. Nordic countries by contrast have lots of these, all very high tech and coupled with small joinery manufacturing companies. Get a catalogue from any builder’s merchant in Scotland and you will see a bewildering array of high tech timber doors and windows from Nordic countries. Not here.”

That has to change. But as ever, the biggest challenge facing a spirited reindustrialisation of Scotland is Westminster’s control of key economic levers. Take energy – which is reserved to London. Last year, UK investment in clean energy halved – a bigger drop than in any other developed country in the world and all because of UK Government policy.

The dramatic slump of 56 per cent in one year means the UK will probably miss its own legally binding carbon reduction targets and lags behind China (where investment is up 24 per cent), Spain (up 36 per cent), Canada (up 45 per cent), the Netherlands (up 30 per cent) and even Donald Trump’s USA (up by one per cent despite his controversial support for coal and nuclear power).

Mary Creagh, the Labour chairwoman of the Commons environmental audit committee, said: “This is the second year in a row renewable energy investment in the UK has nose-dived. Losing European Investment Bank funding if we leave the EU could make the problem even worse.”

Just as well, then that Scotland’s own investment bank is coming on stream in 2020 with an initial fund of £500 million and a mission of revitalising Scotland’s renewables industry. This targeted approach has expert backing.

Ric Lander of Friends of the Earth Scotland says: “The mission-led approach takes the Investment bank away from just pumping money into businesses, and back to public policy and a focus on the common good. It is fundamental that this bank is to benefit society, when we have a financial sector that is self-serving and toxic.”

University College London professor Mariana Mazzucato (one of the Scottish Government’s team of economic advisers) praised the emphasis on “patient finance”.

She says: “Innovation requires patient strategic finance, and there is simply not much of that in the UK. But around the world state investment banks are taking centre stage in providing such finance for key social and environmental challenges of the 21st century.”

Happily Scotland has now joined them. So are we ready to become an industrial nation again – building our own infrastructure with home-made technology, skills and materials? What the heck is stopping us?

Green councillor Gavin Corbett wants “City Region Deals” to steer “away from business as usual – more bypasses and business parks” and towards green reindustrialisation and resilient economies. Former Social Justice Minister Alex Neil would like to see more spending on business research and development – more even than the extra £45m for R&D grants announced by Nicola Sturgeon last year. We spend about one fifth of what Norway and Finland do as a percentage of GDP.

While we’ve got some strong sectors like whisky we aren’t at the races regarding the strength or diversity of manufacturing compared to ‘regions’ in Germany and France.

OF course, it’s not easy for Scotland to hit top gear – we are shrugging off a troubled industrial legacy.

In 19th-century Scotland, the links between coal mining, iron and steel, heavy engineering and shipbuilding, meant a concentration of ownership and a failure to reinvest profits in modernisation. Instead, profits were invested abroad. By the early 20th century there was a widespread view Scotland’s manufacturing sector was too much oriented towards iron, steel, shipbuilding and other heavy engineering industries, all of which were highly dependent on export demand, and too little focused on rapidly growing domestic consumer demand. The two world wars saved these industries temporarily, but after World War II, shipbuilding, railway engines, and other heavy industries faced increasing international competition from the USA, Germany and Japan. After a brief period of focus on ‘indigenous industry’ by the Scottish Development Agency in the 1960s, support for the traditional industries faltered in the 1970s and was effectively ended by the Thatcher government in the 1980s. The focus switched to ‘industrialisation by invitation’, especially on inward investment by US multinationals in office machinery and light manufacturing. These multinationals preferred a non-unionised workforce, and reinforced Thatcher’s anti-union policies from the 1980s. While other comparable countries managed to expand shipbuilding and heavy engineering, particularly Germany, Japan, and Norway and adopt new techniques, Scotland failed to do so.

As Professor John Bryden wrote recently in Northern Neighbours which compares Scotland and Norway since 1800.

“The discovery of North Sea oil in the late 1960s and its exploitation in the 1970s provided little or no succour to Scotland’s indigenous industries, as it came at a time when the industrial base was weak and failing. Downstream and upstream activities mainly benefitted US multinationals, while tax revenues accrued to the Westminster government and were used to bolster the Thatcher neo-liberal project, prosecute international aggression, and bolster re-election prospects.

In short, the UK was following neo-liberal, free trade, approaches to everything, and failing to take the necessary action to retain and adapt its traditional and formerly highly successful skills and industries. It also became highly dependent on inward flows of investment, especially from the USA, for oil development and for manufacturing with the result that much of the profit leaked out from Scotland.”

Norway’s approach to industrialisation, natural resource ownership, and oil specifically, was quite different from that of the UK, and by extension Scotland. Norway’s industrialisation was based largely on hydro-electric power which was a resource dispersed around the country which was thought to belong to communities rather than individuals, unlike coal in Scotland which was a privately owned resource, mostly in the hands of large landowners. Foreign investment in Norwegian hydro power and manufacturing was controlled by the concession laws of 1906 – passed straight after Norwegian independence -- which not only took back control of rivers and therefore hydro-power dams to local municipalities, but also insisted that manufacturing should go hand in hand with the development of the hydro power.

This manufacturing included the smelting, fertiliser and chemical manufacture – all of which required cheap energy. After 25 years, hydro-electric generation had made millions for State-owned electricity companies and councils who used the cash for local development. That’s why almost every small coastal town in Norway has a construction, oil, gas, hydro, aluminium, paper pulp or shipbuilding industry. That in turn is why there’s enough prosperity – even in Arctic Norway – to finance decent infrastructure and retain the rural population. And the “collective” approach to hydro-power also explains the development of North Sea Oil, by a largely state-owned company – Statoil – and the Sovereign Oil Fund which is today worth more than £6 billion, or roughly £100,000 per citizen. In addition, Norway has a rule that Norwegian companies supply the oil industry, meaning that oil revenues have had a much larger local economic impact than they’ve done in Scotland.

All of this has helped Norway take construction jobs from Scots – even though the Norwegian Kroner is two-three times stronger than Sterling.

Norway has made sure that its people have benefitted directly from its hydro-electric and oil resources in a way Scotland has not been able and the UK has not been willing to do. It’s important to know why this is. Norway does not lead Scotland in traditional skills or enterprise relating to hydro, oil or renewables – it had the good fortune to achieve virtual independence from Denmark in 1814 which allowed it to develop better economic policies, rooted in a more democratic and participatory society.

We’ve a long way to go to catch up with Norway – but there’s no question we can do it, once all the levers are in our own hands.

And when that happens, we may look back and see the bold bid to save Bifab as the day we began to believe again in the power of building our ideas.