AS each day passes, the socialist argument for an industrial strategy, an economic plan, and democracy in our economy grows ever stronger.

At the start of last week, I visited the last commercial shipyard on the Clyde.

Ferguson Marine is in public ownership. Its record in building two new large-scale ferries for Scotland’s island communities has been the subject of much public scrutiny because of significant delays and substantial cost overruns.

Instead of being bossed by millionaire tycoons, dictated to by highly paid turnaround directors, former rear admirals and endless consultants, those running the business, past and present, should have simply listened to the trade unions.

From the very start, the workforce could see that the ferries were being built in the wrong sequence, and that expensive materials were being allowed to rot. Decades of experience and knowledge were wilfully ignored.

And the result has cast a shadow over the yard’s future.

We know that there is no shortage of work out there: from the replacement of more Scottish island ferries, smaller vessels much more in keeping with the yard’s long history, to the construction of service operating vessels to meet the new demands of the offshore renewables sector, sparked by the ScotWind licensing round.

If the Scottish government applied the local content rules, and so included the so-called Gross Value-Added metric, the Ferguson yard would win work, even under the present subsidy control regime. The workers deserve nothing less.

So, the yard ought to have a secure long-term future, but that requires investment, economic planning, and it demands democracy.

Then, in the middle of last week, Scotland’s last bus builder, Alexander Dennis, announced that it plans to consult on the possible closure of its two facilities at Falkirk and Larbert, and consolidate operations at its factory in Scarborough.

Again, there is no shortage of orders for buses as old diesel-powered vehicles are replaced by new electric ones.

The question is who will build them, and where?

The announcement came as a bolt from the blue. One union representative told me that they had been “blindsided,” another said that they were “flabbergasted,” not least because it turns out Scotland’s First Minister and his Deputy had been in secret talks with NFI, the company’s Canadian owner, for weeks.

And this raises some broader questions.

Why is there no plan to manage demand, co-ordinate public procurement and align it with the supply base?

Why is the future of such a strategic national manufacturing asset subject to decisions taken in faraway and unaccountable boardrooms?

That is precisely what is also happening just seven miles away at Scotland’s last oil refinery in Grangemouth.

Joint owners tax exile, Jim Ratcliffe, and the Chinese state have embarked on a ruthless close-and-import strategy, with a catastrophic loss of jobs.

Even though we continue to consume refined oil, even though Unite have put forward a conversion plan to move the refinery to a hub for biofuels as part of a just transition.

What is also telling is that the refinery has operated for 100 years in Grangemouth. Alexander Dennis has been manufacturing in Falkirk for a century. Ferguson Marine has built ships in Port Glasgow since 1903.

There is something fundamentally wrong with the balance of power as well as wealth in the economy when the livelihoods of generations of workers and the prosperity of communities can be switched on and off with no accountability.

The SNP has prided itself on attracting foreign direct investment into Scotland. In fact, to the extent that the Scottish government has an economic strategy that is it.

As a result, we have witnessed a growing concentration of economic wealth and power in fewer and fewer hands. Inequality has risen, and manufacturing employment has continued to decline.

Over a third of all Scotland’s manufacturing workers are now employed in firms owned overseas.

In bigger manufacturing enterprises, over a half of the workforce are.

Scotland is overwhelmingly a branch plant economy which brings with it the externalisation of supply chains, the export of profits and dividends and the stripping out of local decision-making.

There is an alternative, based on an industrial strategy with a renewal of democratic, strategic economic planning.

So that, in place of global corporations and their lobbyists nesting in the political realm, the government instead provides economic leadership and drives agreements with them on investment, research and development and jobs on their terrain.

We should not simply demand the direct involvement of trade unions in sectoral-level bargaining, but their involvement in long-term sectoral-level planning too.

If we do not break from the existing neoliberal economic model and promote public, co-operative and municipal ownership, our economy will continue to be, in effect, colonised by multinational corporations, global capital and financial markets.

We must be prepared to take some risks, to learn from international, as well as historical, experience.

Alexander Dennis and the Grangemouth oil refinery have been in public ownership before. That must remain an option now, but public ownership should not be reduced to a tool of reactive crisis management alone. It must be a proactive option too.

What we cannot rely on is either an industrial policy which is predicated on foreign direct investment, or the version which has emerged in the Labour government’s first year, which appears to rest on the freeport, the weapons manufacturer, the arms trade and the nuclear menace.

It really is time for a radical change, and I am more convinced than ever that change will come from below, that the trade union movement has a critical role to play, not as defenders of the current logic of capitalism, but as challengers to it, and that calls not just for industrial mobilisation, but for an overtly political resurgence too.

Richard Leonard is the Scottish Labour MSP for the Central Scotland Region.