Swinney visits 'crisis' towns asking for help after 1,500 job losses

John Swinney is facing calls for government action to support one of Scotland's smallest council areas as it struggles with the cumulative loss of 1,500 jobs.

The first minister will spend much of the day touring Inverclyde at the invitation of the local authority to see for himself the special challenges facing the region.

Council leader Stephen McCabe says a drip feed of closures has left the area facing a desperate jobs crisis, on top of years of deindustrialisation and depopulation.

Swinney will meet local politicians as well as visiting community groups and managers from the nationalised Ferguson shipyard, a week after they announced plans to shed a quarter of its workforce.

Other employers which have cut jobs in recent years include IBM, Amazon, BPI Berry, EE, Cigna International Health, RBS and Kindryl.

McCabe believes the piecemeal shedding of jobs has not attracted the same political attention as other high-profile closures.

The impact is magnified, he argues, because Inverclyde has a population of just 78,000, having fallen by a fifth in the past 50 years.

"For an area the size of Inverclyde that's the equivalent of 15,000 in Glasgow."

They were once at the heart of Scotland's economic prosperity, first through herring fishing and transatlantic trade, then shipbuilding and engineering, while nearby Gourock was a popular Victorian seaside resort.

An almost unbroken line of slipways, cranes and workshops employing thousands of workers once stretched for miles along the south bank of the lower Clyde.

Greenock was also known for sugar refining, at one point boasting 15 refineries, earning it the nickname Sugaropolis.

But the shipbuilding industry crumbled rapidly in the 1970s and 1980s, and Tate & Lyle shut the final Greenock sugar refinery in 1997.

There were hopes that electronics firms such as IBM would replace the old industries but the "Silicon Glen" dream faltered, with the firm scaling down its operations, then closing its main Spango Valley site in 2016.

The establishment of an Amazon "fulfilment centre" at Gourock provided a glimmer of hope in the early 2000s but that too shut down three years ago.