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Walk into the Learning Centre on the High Street and you get a sense of how well the new Paisley has learned to handle the strains of globalization. It looks like a trendy advertising agency, with floor-to-ceiling glass windows, fancy lighting and lots of computers on attractive desks. In fact, it's part of an effort to spread information technology to the disadvantaged — and business is booming. More than 3,000 people attended the first year: students getting university credit, drop-ins who stay to do courses, policemen, housewives. "I've always done manual labor," says Rose Allan, 49, struggling over a spreadsheet. "I have no experience in this kind of thing." But she is doggedly working on a free 40-hour course to gain a European Computer Driving License — a qualification in basic skills like word processing and database programs recognized across the E.U.
The Learning Centre is the brainchild of the Paisley Partnership, an innovative group that's tackling the town's social problems. It joins up every relevant body — local government and universities, the employment service, the housing, health and economic development authorities, the police and even the Chamber of Commerce — to forge a common agenda. The idea is to "bend the spend" of all these bigger agencies, which amounts to about $1.5 billion a year. A key aim of the Paisley Partnership is to educate people for the new economy — and get them young enough to make a difference.
The Partnership's director, Stephen Wright, insisted that the Learning Centre not look like the typical grungy shopfront of an antipoverty program. "I'm an old supermarket manager," he says, "and if you want to promote access to information technology, you've got to go where the people are." He is also talking with the local cable TV company about how to get Internet access for low-income tenants. The company will make money selling premium channels, and the tenants will get on the right side of the digital divide. "Not having an e-mail address is starting to disadvantage people, even in Paisley," he says.
The new Scottish government is still finding its feet, but already Wright notices a welcome change of emphasis. The town's member of the Edinburgh Parliament, Wendy Alexander, has visited the Learning Centre several times. She is Minister for Enterprise and Lifelong Learning and can make things happen. Already the Renfrewshire Council has announced a $900-million program for refurbishing and building schools, with most of the money coming from Edinburgh. Another $9 million was recently announced for education and screening to cut coronary disease, which is higher in Scotland than anywhere else in Europe.
Ian Snodgrass, the council's Director of Planning and Transport, is also impressed with what devolution has accomplished so far. Many members of the Edinburgh Parliament came out of local government, which means "the politicians can ask far more interesting questions of the civil servants." They are becoming far more aware of how services are actually delivered "at the coalface," he says, which means that essential projects have a better chance of happening. Edinburgh looks likely to revive a long-delayed program to extend the M74 motorway, for example, which local governments and businesses have been advocating to London in vain for years.
Scottish nationalists argue that all this tinkering with the machinery of government is fine, but that London still steals the North Sea oil revenues that would allow Scotland to achieve real social justice. "To help places like Paisley, we have to go down the radical route of other small northern European countries like Norway and Denmark," says George Adam, the Scottish National Party's parliamentary candidate for Paisley North. "We produce more oil than Kuwait. The Scottish Parliament brings democracy closer, but it doesn't have enough power."
At 67 High Street in Paisley is Wm. M. Houston, Gents' Outfitters, a shop run by Ken MacDonald that looks as if it hasn't been redecorated in 40 years. Inside is a tiny e-commerce powerhouse. MacDonald saw that retail traffic was deserting downtown for suburban malls and figured he had to innovate or die. Now he and 14 employees sell kilts and other Highland wear all over the world, via 12 websites and a cd-rom with a 40-page brochure and a video in five languages, including Japanese. "This isn't the future," he says, "it's the present — and we have to be part of it." His enterprise is just one example of the new energy the people of Paisley, now more fully in charge of their own destiny, are finding in doing things for themselves.
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