Further to your front page story 'Jobs crisis' on May 18, I really have to reply to the bland statement from Scottish Enterprise: "Since our restructure in 2008, responsibility for local regeneration and skills development has moved to other public sector organisations." Pontius Pilate would have been proud of that one!
So, prior to 2008 who was responsible for economic and social regeneration?
Across its life span the Independent Resource Centre and predecessors have witnessed the coming and going of Government intervention initiatives which we can place under the collective label of "regeneration strategies".
We have had the industrial estates of the early 1970s; the Scottish Development Agency 'Task Force' and 1980's Enterprise Zones; the Smaller Urban Regeneration Initiative (SURIs) and Priority Partnership Areas (PPAs) of the 1990s which led to Social Inclusion Partnership (SIPs) and latterly, Community Planning Partnerships (CPPs) and Urban Regeneration companies.
It's the Dr Who syndrome - when one body has run out of ideas they simply adopt another face and carry on with the same script and often with the same actors in different roles.
Given the disgraceful but indisputable facts of local unemployment, poverty and deprivation "regeneration strategies" have clearly had negligible impact on the lives of those whom it was meant to assist.
Einstein's definition of insanity was to keep doing the same thing and expecting different results. We truly live in a crazy world when despite the tens, if not hundreds of millions of pounds, poured into West Dunbartonshire over four decades, there is still no apparent understanding among policy gurus and politicians of the true nature and scale of the problems and how these have to be addressed if there is to be a different outcome. For far too long we have tolerated "the emperors with no clothes" who promise much but deliver little.
It is time to be angry and to let that anger be harnessed to demand a different approach.
No more talking shops.
No more task forces.
No more consultants' reports.
No more political posturing and professional spin.
We need ground breaking, radical, innovative, creative action.
I do not believe that this can come from those who have failed so often in the past.
They are in my view part of the problem - not part of the solution.
Scotland's new majority government should seize the initiative and wind of change to persuade their allies and friends within the national business and charitable community to advise and to invest their time, skills and money in assisting the local community to turn around the fortunes of West Dunbartonshire.
That task is best achieved by those with a track record of success and achievement.
What is needed is a challenge laid down to Scotland's leading entrepreneurial figures.
Forget 'Dragons Den', forget 'Secret Millionaire', forget the 'Apprentice'.
If you want a real challenge and truly have an entrepreneurial drive coupled with a social conscience then the task is here - right on your doorstep.
Come and work with us.
Danny McCafferty, chair, Independent Resource Centre Clydebank
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