Letter: Why reformer Owen is worthy of note

It was with delight and amazement that I read Michael Fry's piece (Opinion, 3 June) on Robert Owen and New Lanark. Even after 200 years, Owen's name, and the possibility of his image on a Scottish banknote, causes the establishment to react with characteristic vitriol. This social revolutionary still stirs the passions that he inflamed 200 years ago. Even the technique has not changed. Owen constantly found his views and position misrepresented as a method of attacking his innova

Owen was a new industrialist at the start of the 19th century, trying to deal with the life-changing impact of the industrial revolution. Most of his capitalist contemporaries exploited working people with a ruthless brutality. Owen did not want child labour. He wanted children in education with no corporal punishment. For adults, he wanted decent working and living conditions, healthcare, pensions and the elimination of poverty as part of a new moral society. He started a village store at New Lanark, which became one of the roots of the co-operative movement. He supported the community of freed slaves at Nashoba in Tennessee, and the Scotswoman who ran it. He wanted to apply his industrial experience to create a better world for all creeds, colours and religions.

As Michael Fry states, Owen was not perfect, and not Scottish. However, encouraged by his article and the naked hostility it exudes, the majority of MSPs voted for Bill Butler's motion proposing Owen's image on a Scottish banknote. Michael Fry's article was referred to in the debate, but it even encouraged the government to give its support in approaching the banks.

Has Michael Fry not heard that even David Cameron has espoused the cause of co-operativism. We must remember to invite the Prime Minister to visit New Lanark.

JIM ARNOLD

Director, New Lanark (rtd)

Robert Owen was a controversial and puzzling figure, but I'm surprised my old friend Michael Fry, surely one of Scotland's sharpest historians, should fall into the classic trap of equating modern attitudes to race, class and religion with those of 200 years ago.

Owen thought the slaves he saw in the West Indies and America better off than most workers in Britain. He later caused consternation in New Orleans by criticising the place of coloured people in society and the role of religion – hardly likely to endear him to Southern audiences. Incidentally, David Dale, Owen's father-in-law, the founder of New Lanark, was a prominent abolitionist.

On the issue of evidence to Factory Commissions, it seems likely that those testifying to abuses were in the pockets of reactionary mill owners who opposed the national implementation of Owen's workplace reforms.

History can be controversial and heritage difficult, but Owen's ideas on social and economic regeneration have continuing validity in our own time.

(PROF) IAN DONNACHIE

Chair, Friends of New Lanark