Layout and Location - The Stones and the Stars: Building Scotland's Newest Megalith - page 109

lecture he showed a slide he had taken from the platform, clearly
showing Jura in the position claimed. (It appears as a color plate
in The Megalith Builders , although, to be fair, that book wasn't
published until 1977 [ 8 ] .) In June 1978, on a field trip organized
by the Astronomical Society of Glasgow, I had the opportunity to
discuss the excavation with Euan MacKie while standing on the
exact spot. Although it was too cloudy to see the Jura peaks, the
shadow on the clouds showed plainly where they were (Fig. 5.4 ) .
Other controversies were about to interact with the mega-
lithic one. In the later 1970s the Scottish National Party had been
making considerable headway with the campaign slogan 'It's Scot-
land's Oil,' maintaining that Britain's 'offshore' resources of oil
and gas should rightfully belong to an independent Scotland. Other
opponents of the Labor government were making an issue of rising
unemployment, and in 1979 Mrs. Thatcher and the Conservative
Party were to fight the general election successfully with the slo-
gan 'Labor Isn't Working.' In an attempt to address both issues the
Labor government set up the Jobs Creation Scheme, to be followed
by the Special Temporary Employment Program in 1979.
Under pressure from the Trades Unions, Jobs Creation was tied
to so many conditions that it became almost impossible to claim
the money. The maximum period of employment was to be a year,
no permanent jobs were to be created, all projects were to be non-
profit, there was to be no competition with any form of unionized
labor, and so it went on. Politically, in Scotland, that could be advan-
tageous. It could allow the government to say that when offered an
extra share of the oil revenue, the Scots hadn't wanted it after all.
What happened in Glasgow was that, rather like the Norse
myth of Baldur and the mistletoe, the planners had forgotten about
the Parks Department. For all its industrial reputation, Glasgow, 'the
dear green place,' has more parkland per head of population than any
other city in Europe; the parks were non-profit, and the employment
was seasonal and non-unionized. Everything fitted. Another condi-
tion to be met was that the structuring of jobs had to follow a some-
what unusual set of ratios. But the labor-intensive Parks Department
was able to comply with those, too. The sum offered to Glasgow was
£4 million, and under the formula that was to create exactly 1,001
temporary posts. So the program became 'The 1,001 Project,' with
the unofficial slogan, taking off a carpet-cleaner advertisement of the
early 60s, “1,001 cleans a big, big city, for only four million quid!”