THE WORKING MAN - No.7 in the series 'Old Photos of Scotland'

Seventh video in the series, 'Old Photos of Scotland', and we're looking at old photos of workers in Scotland. And not just men. Many of the images show working women, and there are indeed probably just as many working women as men. We have photos of women making bombs during the 1914-18 Great War; women making aeroplanes in the same period; women making warships again during the same period, and women working in bare feet for a reason we can't quite fathom. In the old days we made lots of things, as demonstrated in the photographs. Today, we make much less than we used to, and import much of what we need from abroad, thereby denying the British workforce a job. Indeed, it wasn't that long ago that that great British retail institution Marks & Spencer's turned its back on British workers and decided to get a lot of goods from places like India and China. In doing so, they probably put something like four-thousand-five-hundred British workers out of work. Heavens, in the old days we even made our own gas, with every town and village supplied by a local gas-works. Today, not only are British workers shunned in favour of foreign workers making cheap goods abroad, much of the gas and electricity - and even water - is owned by foreign firms, with profits going abroad and to shareholders around the world. It's hardly surprising we're skint, with a UK economy rapidly going down the plughole. This is old photos of Scotland, but it's really much more than that. It's a search for hope in a UK economy that has very little money for anything.