On my office wall I have a floor-to-ceiling collection of old trade advertisements, featuring numerous Glasgow companies that once proudly exported their products from our city around the world.
While some companies are still going strong, sadly many are long gone, a couple of those being recent losses to the city’s economy. One of the most eye-catching of these adverts is for Macfarlane, Lang & Co, showing off their Royal Warrant and brand-new Victoria Biscuit Works, which opened at Tollcross in 1925.
The firm’s 205-year history in Glasgow started when James Lang opened a bakery shop on the Gallowgate in 1817. His nephew, John Macfarlane, later joined the family company. Macfarlane Lang merged with McVitie & Price of Edinburgh to form United Biscuits in 1948.
Together, the Scottish-headquartered company soon expanded to become one of Britain's leading food firms with brands including Carr's of Carlisle and William MacDonald & Sons’ famous Penguin biscuit. Its flagship Tollcross factory became the iconic home of the Hobnob, first launched there in 1985.
From 2000 onwards, the family-run business was overhauled by a succession of private equity and foreign owners, who loaded it with debt and failed to invest in either product innovation or the modernisation of its factories. In 2014, it was sold to Turkish conglomerate Yildiz, now Pladis.
It’s an all too familiar tale in our city’s industrial decline: control of the company moves away from Glasgow to a faceless foreign boardroom, investment stagnates, and closure of the redundant original branch becomes inevitable. This story played out with a grim glibness in May 2021 when the managing director turned up unannounced in Tollcross, the original home of the company, to tell the loyal Glaswegian workforce they were now surplus to requirements after more than two centuries of service.
Last week, it was revealed that McVitie’s parent company, Pladis, secretly donated £1 million to Glasgow City Council, to be spent in the East End of the city.
It has since transpired that Pladis insisted on a Non-Disclosure Agreement to keep the donation under wraps. This is the very same company that committed industrial vandalism in the East End just over two years ago – no wonder they wanted to ensure that the donation remained anonymous.
Whilst the cash-strapped Council isn’t exactly able to refuse, the £1 million donation is a paltry legacy that does very little to repair the economic damage that Pladis inflicted on our city when 470 skilled workers were made redundant.
The tokenistic sum will barely dent the firm’s reported £130 million boost in profit in 2023, the millions they made from selling the factory site off to property developers last year – and it’s nowhere near enough to rectify the £50 million annual black hole left in our economy since the factory’s closure.
Indeed, Pladis received just shy of £1 million in a public grant from Scottish Enterprise in the years before they callously decided to close their last Scottish factory. As workers left the site for the last time in September 2022, they had to watch as state-of-the-art machinery was dismantled and shipped off to other McVitie’s factories in England – machinery originally paid for by Scottish Government money. In effect, the donation was merely indirectly returning what Pladis took from the public purse.
When the shocking closure of Tollcross was first announced, I campaigned alongside trade union colleagues in Unite and GMB to persuade Pladis not to abandon their historic Glasgow home. But, like we have seen time-and-time-again, the overseas owner was hellbent on asset stripping the factory and moving operations elsewhere – with little interest in the devastation left behind.
It begs the question, what more can we do to stop huge multinationals swooping in and running our companies into the ground and extracting the profits?
Scotland must do more to protect domestic ownership of homegrown brands like McVitie’s and safeguard jobs so that communities have more confidence that, to paraphrase Jimmy Reid, faceless men cannot devastate their livelihoods with impunity.
You can read my column in the Glasgow Times here: https://www.glasgowtimes.co.uk/news/24895789.crumbs-mcvities-owner-adds-insult-injury-decline/
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