Westland plc

Part of Opposition Day – in the House of Commons at 8:07 pm on 15 January 1986.

Alert me about debates like this

Photo of Mr John Wilkinson Mr John Wilkinson , Ruislip - Northwood 8:07, 15 January 1986

After today's debate, there may be as many different views on why my right hon. Friend the Member for Henley (Mr. Heseltine), the former Secretary of State for Defence, resigned as there are Members who heard him speak this afternoon. I have my own opinion, for what it is worth, and I shall share it with the House. To be candid, I think that my right hon. Friend was rumbled. I found his stewardship of the Ministry of Defence deficient in terms of a helicopter strategy. Many of us were warning the Ministry for many a long month of that deficiency. The aviation committee, of which I was the then chairman, visited Westland at Yeovil in November 1984, and ever since that date it was warning the Ministry, and especially my right hon. Friend, that something urgent had to be done about Westland if the company was to be saved.

My right hon. Friend rationalised his resignation. He did so with the invocation of grandiose ideas about the European-American relationship, the two-way, or, as he would describe it, the one-way street, and the difficulty which our manufacturers face in selling their products into the American market. As so often with my right hon. Friend, he overstated his case. He suggested, for example, that it was virtually impossible to sell into the American market and yet Normalair Garrett, which is an important part of Westland, has a significant system in the Rockwell B1 supersonic bomber. It has another system on the F18 fighter aircraft. Normalair Garrett is a 50–50 company, half Garrett and half Westland, half American and half British. So the fact that that section of Westland has been in part American has in no way detracted—rather the contrary—from its ability to sell into the American market.

Furthermore, one of the great difficulties that Aerospatiale, the big white hope of my right hon. Friend the former Secretary of State for Defence, has faced in selling its products into the United States has been its lack of an American partner to assist it in that process. One of the causes of the substantial losses incurred by Aerospatiale in its helicopter division has been its failure to sell helicopters, particularly the Dauphin, into the United States of America.

It is my belief that the relationship with Sikorsky, if endorsed by the shareholders on Friday, will enable the Westland company to sell the EH101 into the United States market. It would not have such a good chance of doing so were the Sikorsky-Fiat rescue package to be turned down. I say that because Sikorsky does not have an aeroplane in the 15-tonne class, the EH101 class, so it looks to the acquisition of the possibility of helping to sell the EH101 in the USA as something significant.

My right hon. Friend also adduced all sorts of grandiose arguments about burden-sharing. Here, too, his arguments were deficient because if burden-sharing means anything to me—and I wrote a paper for the Western European Union on this subject only two years ago—it means an equitable sharing of the financial burdens of defence.