Jim Phillips is a leading authority on deindustrialisation in Scotland. He has pioneered the use of a moral economy framework for explaining the social and political results of lost employment in industrial sectors since the 1950s. Deindustrialisation was broadly accepted as fair in Scotland in the 1960s and 1970s because the security of workers and communities affected was protected by Labour governments at UK level. Employment alternatives were stimulated. Conservative governments at UK level in the 1980s and 1990s enabled the acceleration of industrial employment losses without supporting those affected, which was why deindustrialisation came to be seen as grossly unjust in Scotland.
He is the author of Scottish Coal Miners in the Twentieth Century (Edinburgh University Press, 2019) and co-author, with Valerie Wright and Jim Tomlinson, of Deindustrialisation and the Moral Economy in Scotland since 1955 (Edinburgh University Press, 2021).
