ABSTRACT
The Highlands and Islands have become depopulated through a long process which began with savage suppression and has been completed through greed and indifference and neglect. The Border counties, in spite of the well-known toughness of their inhabitants, suffer from this wasting malady, as do also the Northern Isles – the Orkneys and Shetlands. The outstanding feature of the economic landscape in Scotland during the last fifty years has been the high rate of unemployment. British European Airways transferred maintenance work from Renfrew to the South; and so on and so on. The need for economy seems almost always to work to the disadvantage of the North. The unemployment figures for Scotland, serious as they are, conceal true picture in another way. Englishmen can recognise clearly enough that it may be bad for England to lose her ablest sons, no matter what success they may achieve in exile; but they are strangely reluctant to accept the same principle for Scotland.
