Defence Industry

Part of the debate – in the Scottish Parliament at on 20 November 2013.

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Photo of Duncan McNeil Duncan McNeil Labour

Johann Lamont said that she has the Govan shipyard in her constituency, and I am proud to say that I have constituents who work for BAE Systems in the Govan shipyard and at Rosyth.

The road has been long and it has not been an easy one. There are many reasons why we are in a situation in which so little shipbuilding is done in Scotland. There is no doubt that it has been a difficult journey. The issues that have brought about the situation do not change. EU competition laws do not change—and will not change, whether people vote yes or no in the referendum. That means that it will be difficult.

It is a long time since we have won and built a merchant ship. We cannot even win the competition to build boats for CalMac Ferries. That is the scale of the challenge, and we cannot ignore it.

All the other countries that have been mentioned have gone over the years. They came and we taught them. They built up their own capacity and then they decided, as independent nations, that they would rather build the ships themselves.

We heard from the Deputy First Minister that we could overcome the issue and that, under independence, we could build Australian ships. I found that most offensive. I hope that it was not deliberately misleading and that she was badly advised when she read out that statement. We have not built an Australian ship for 35 years. That is the reality, and we cannot overstate the scale of the issue.

About 15 years ago, when a Labour Government was in power, we got to a stage that was welcomed by all the trade unions and, I think, all the political parties. The shipbuilding industry was not the industry that we knew. It did not employ the tens of thousands of people that it had employed in the past, due to some of the things I have referred to: we could not compete effectively and we never invested effectively. We used to build out in the rain, whereas others built inside. Shipyards across Europe and in other countries now import the steel hulls. There are no steelworkers working in the shipyards in Germany. They import from Poland and exploit the cheap labour there. We have missed those chances to keep up, so we have a small number of people building ships.

We used to call it the rent book on the Clyde. The grey ships were the backbone—they were what we were guaranteed. I concede to the minister that they have been seen as a rent book and a subsidy for shipbuilding ever since. Those are the only orders that we can win, and that is why it is vital that we do not risk them. Regrettably, we do not have a plan in place that will carry the workforce, so we cannot risk having a situation in which the UK Government will not sign off the ships.