FOR as long as I can remember the Scottish labour movement has been campaigning to save the Scottish steel industry.

From the long march to London to save the Gartcosh Rolling Mill in the 1980s to the fight for steel-making at Ravenscraig which was finally lost in 1992 and all that went with it: the closure of the Calder Works in Coatbridge and then the Imperial Tube Works in Airdrie.

The battle for other plants and steel jobs in Lanarkshire at Craigneuk and New Stevenston now gone.

I can recall the tensions between shop stewards in different steelworks, between the Labour Party and the Scottish TUC, between British Steel industry bosses and the Scottish media, but all because it was understood that a strong manufacturing economy needed a vibrant steel industry.

And now we face a new crisis, with the last remaining plants of the once-mighty nationalised steel industry in Motherwell and Cambuslang under threat of mothballing if their current owner Tata cannot find a buyer.

The Scottish government has set up a Scottish steel task force whose main focus is to find a way of keeping both of these iconic plants open. This is extremely welcome and has found cross-party support. I am privileged to be the GMB’s representative on it.

But it beggars belief that when we have a huge offshore oil and gas industry — 90 per cent of it in the Scottish sector of the UK continental shelf — when there are massive publicly funded infrastructure projects like a new bridge over the Forth north of Edinburgh, massive onshore and offshore wind farms built and planned to be built, when we still retain a shipbuilding and engineering sector of some note, that the end of steel production and finishing in Scotland is even a possibility.

There needs to be an urgent response to save what remains of this vital strategic industry, of course, but what is blatantly obvious is that we need a long-term solution.

We need an industrial policy and a manufacturing strategy, a public procurement strategy and an industrial supply chain policy based on economic planning led by the Scottish government.

In other words the crisis in Scottish steel demands Scottish government intervention — not just to convene a task force but to develop an industrial strategy which rejects the iron laws of the market.

If we have huge natural resources like the wind, water, oil and gas available, or substantial financial resources funded by the people, we the people should plan how they are to be used, when and by whom.

Of course with the world oil price collapse over the last 12 months there are new pressures on that industry. But as recently as January 2015 the Scottish Business Insider’s annual 500 business index showed as many as 13 of the 30 wealthiest companies operating in Scotland in 2014 were oil and gas suppliers or exploration companies.

We shouldn’t simply have Scottish Enterprise accounts, we should have government economic planning agreements with these big transnational, predominantly overseas-owned corporations.

Planning agreements which provide for collective trade union representation, which guarantee greater stability for the workforce and which contain undertakings about the sourcing and planning of supply contracts — including decommissioning contracts.

The same should apply to the renewable energy sector which draws heavily on engineering technology, fabrication and construction and raw materials like steel.

There has been a downturn here too, but in the past few days Norwegian state-owned Statoil has handed a contract to build an offshore wind farm 20 miles off the east coast of Scotland — in British waters and supported by £153 million of public subsidies — to a Spanish company. At the same time a fabrication yard on the east coast of Scotland, BiFab at Methil, which bid for the work is hanging by a thread.

And what about public-sector infrastructure projects? The First Minister has pledged to “leave no stone unturned” to save the Scottish steel industry. But the stones should have been turned when contracts for the Forth Replacement Crossing were being awarded, and an economic planning agreement put in place. And the shame of the Ministry of Defence buying defence equipment from overseas firms such as Sweden’s Saab does not make any sense either.

Of course I recognise that Scotland is part of the United Kingdom which is a member state of the European Union, which is opposed to economic planning and a proponent of the free

market. But that does not prevent the Scottish government from developing a strategy and insisting on conditions on supply chain policy in return for access to resources.

Neither does it prevent other forms of intervention up to and including public ownership of strategic industries and services. This might also include activation of the clause of Tony Benn’s 1975 Industry Act, still on the statute book, which provides for public intervention to block an overseas takeover of strategically important industries.

For all the talk of the dumping of Chinese steel on the European market — unquestionably a real and present danger — according to the International Steel Statistics Bureau last year the UK imported more steel products from Germany than anywhere else.

It is not possible to simply import a German-style industrial policy into Britain, or Scotland, even if that were desirable. But it is realistic to expect the Scottish government to work with the trade union movement, councils and those presently running the commanding heights of our economy to draw up an indicative economic plan, which could join together procurement, manufacturing, industrial and employment policy.

It is after all about time we put society before the market and people before profit. If we have learnt anything from the last 30 years it must be that privatising a key industry like British Steel, bowing down before the alter of free-market economics and abandoning the very concept of economic planning, has been an experimental mistake of historic proportions.

We need once again to get back to that age-old labour and socialist principle that we need democracy in our economy as well as in our political system. We need economic as well as political accountability — and we need not just words but deeds now.

• Richard Leonard is GMB Scotland political officer.