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Immigration From The Commonwealth Countries Also Increased, Placing Further ...

Immigration from the Commonwealth countries also increased, placing further strain on Scotland's economic resources. However, in spite of all these gradual changes, it was without a doubt the policies of the Thatcher Government during the 1980's that forever changed the landscape of the Scottish economy and, by association, its workforce and educational culture. By privatising industry and closing the vast majority of Scotland's coal mines and steel works, Thatcher singlehandedly took away the economy's major employer, reducing in the process the historical stranglehold of the trade unions over important industrial issues such as pay (Mitchell, 1990). Yet in the vacuum created by the dissolution of industry, there was no active replacement. Scottish enterprise and private sector savvy thus had to be engendered in the forthcoming generations so as to stabilise employment figures in Scotland and indeed in other regions of the British Isles. This should consequently be seen as the starting point of the switchover to the knowledge economy in Scottish politics.
It can be seen that the Scottish economy has been the subject of vast, uncompromising change during the preceding one hundred years and that the motive behind much of this change came from external influences that had little or nothing to do with the functioning of the Scottish economy. In essence, while Scotland was an export economy, the territories to which it had been exporting (predominantly Commonwealth countries) were no longer bound by custom to trade only with the regions of the United Kingdom. In this way, the British economy had to quickly adjust to the principles of the free market and to the ideals of free trade in order to compete with the new economies of the late twentieth century. This further increased the need for a structured Scottish knowledge economy that was geared to meet the specific economic realities of the day.
Yet while the economic influence of Scotland has diminished markedly on the world stage, the Scottish history of economic knowledge has traditionally been very strong. It should not be forgotten that Adam Smith and John Locke, two of the fundamental building blocks of global trade and of modern economic theory, were Scottish intellectuals and it was largely via their knowledge that the modern British economy was forged. Likewise in the contemporary era when it has been Gordon Brown's ‘third way' of economic policy that has helped to reinvigorate the beleaguered British economy through encouraging innovative partnerships between public, private and voluntary sectors (Giddens, 1998). It is therefore the aim of modern curriculum to foster this heritage of knowledge and innovation for use in a private sector context.
The policy impetus for change in the Scottish and British knowledge economy has come from New Labour.


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