Scotland counts the cost of industrial bail-outs

IN ONE SHED a worker tests welding guns, alone but for the radio. In the next a crew admires a machine fresh in from the Netherlands, which cuts steel pipes to elegant curves. By mid-August the air will be thick with fumes and sparks. Some 400 workers will assemble steel into latticed tripods, 20 storeys high. In the spring these will be towed out in the Firth of Forth and dropped to the seabed. A wind turbine will be fixed atop, sweeping 200m above the waves. They will form part of the Neart Na Gaoithe array, built by the state-owned electricity firms of France and Ireland, EDF and ESB.