IN THE coming days — it may even be as soon as today — John Swinney will become the seventh first minister of Scotland.

I first met him almost four decades ago in the years immediately following the miners’ strike. He was working with the then Labour councillor and socialist economist, George Kerevan, who years later would become an SNP MP. 

Back then, together with Dr Richard Saville and Debra Percival, they were researching and writing a report commissioned by the British Labour Group of MEPs on an alternative to the European Commission’s Plan For Coal. 

The commission’s strategy was one of close and import. The British Labour Group, including socialists like the late Alex Falconer, who I worked for, were making the case for jobs, investment and a long-term energy future. 

Those very same arguments are raging once again, this time over the future of Scotland’s only oil refinery. Some 500 direct jobs in Grangemouth are at risk, and the refinery’s owners Ineos and PetroChina want to shut down this strategic facility and build an import terminal instead: in short, a close and import strategy. 

Unite’s alternative is to extend the life of the refinery, invest in new technology and energy diversification, and transition the site to renewable, green alternatives. Swinney, familiar as he is with this reasoning from all those years ago, must actively back the workers’ plan.

Later today in the Scottish Parliament when the business of MSPs turns from figureheads and the trappings of high office to the language of political priorities, I will be leading a debate on another industrial question, the long running dispute in Scotland’s colleges.

Members of the EIS union who work in the further education sector haven’t had a pay rise in three years.

Both the employers organisation, Colleges Scotland, and the EIS are in agreement that the further education sector has been unduly squeezed. 

A view borne out by Audit Scotland which warns of colleges running a deficit, and of college courses being cut, in the face of a 8.5 per cent real-terms reduction in funding. The sector is, by any measure, chronically underfunded.

This is an industrial dispute which could be quite easily resolved. But it won’t be if ministers continue to obstinately sit on their hands, at a time when it clearly requires direct government intervention and renewed political leadership. It calls for vigour, ingenuity and determination, and it demands money.

The omens are not good. The inactive colleges minister argued in Parliament just last week that those of us calling for investment in further education should tell him which hospital we should cut to pay for it. 

It is a desperately shallow argument which ignores the fact that education is an investment, that the Scottish government does not have a fixed budget, but has tax-raising options at its disposal, and that in successive years it has found ways of averting public-sector strike action by applying additional finance. 

The Scottish government has a £50 billion budget. Covid money is still unaccounted for. With the political will, this can be fixed. 

This is important, not just for the sake of good industrial relations, but there is a wider point here. It was US socialist Eugene Debs who memorably said: “When I rise it will be with the ranks not from the ranks. Full opportunity for full development is the unalienable right of all.”

Further education colleges provide huge community benefit. They are a part of our social infrastructure, as well as our economic future.

If there is to be a just transition as we decarbonise the economy, it will require the reskilling of many workers. They will not get that from a university degree, but from active vocational training.

To pick up Debs’s century-old argument, equality of opportunity isn’t about how you do at school. That shouldn’t define you. Too often our education system is still built on the premise that if at first you don’t succeed, you don’t succeed. We need lifelong learning, and we need to understand that for some students, if they do not get opportunities in education, they will be driven to remain isolated at home. For yet others it may mean instead of a positive engagement with the education system they will have a negative engagement with the criminal justice system. 

Full development is the unalienable right for all. It also serves the common good. Yet, according to the EIS, it is these most marginalised students, from our most marginalised communities, who are the ones most likely to see their courses cut.

A strike is a failing of the employer. It represents a crisis in the established social order. Some college principals — or chief executives as they prefer to be called — are deepening this crisis by provocatively proposing to make salary deductions for action short of strike action: deeming lecturers for simply working to contract as part of the dispute. 

The new first minister, and the old further education minister, can address the mainsprings of this discontent and the resulting industrial conflict. In so doing they wouldn’t be surrendering their authority but exercising their authority.

They have both the duty and the power to do so.

Richard Leonard is MSP for the Central Scotland region and served as leader of the Scottish Labour Party from 2017 to 2021.