What will the lads do on Monday?

Simon Fell has accused the Labour Party of talking down Barrow's shipyard after constituency chair, Chris Altree wrote to him with legitimate concerns about government defence plans.

Barrow and Furness used to be a safe Labour seat. Simon Fell, supported by ex-Labour MP, John Woodcock, exploited fears that the shipyard was under threat from a left wing Labour government, to win the seat for the Tories in the 2019 general election. The fact that these fears were groundless made no difference. For as long as I can remember the Tories have campaigned in Barrow on the basis that voting Tory is a vote for jobs and voting Labour is a vote for redundancies.

Cecil Franks took the seat for the Tories in 1983 with the slogan, "What will the lads do on Monday." And for a while it seemed true. The Trident programme to build Vanguard class submarines saw employment at the shipyard to rise from 9,500 to 14,300 during the 1980s.  The shipyard was privatised via a management buyout in 1986 and became Vickers Shipbuilding and Engineering Ltd.

VSEL was wholly dependent on the Ministry of Defence for its order book. The trade unions were worried by this and came up with proposals for diversification which management rejected. But with the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1990 it was a Conservative government that slashed defence spending. 5000 shipyard workers lost their jobs and apprenticeships dried up. Franks lost his seat to Labour in the 1992 General Election. The Tories remained in office and defence cuts continued. At its lowest point the yard employed less than 3,000 men and women as the Trident programme neared completion.

In 1997 a new Labour government took action to revive the shipyard with the decision to renew Britain's nuclear submarine fleet. It had been originally envisaged as a modest upgrade based on the existing Trafalgar class. But after successive takeovers of VSEL by GEC and then Bae Systems, the Astute programme emerged as a much more ambitious replacement programme.

This programme has guaranteed the shipyard's future since the completion of the Trident programme. Employment has steadily risen alongside new apprenticeship schemes. The Astute programme is coming to an end with the final three boats under construction. A replacement for the Vanguard submarines that carry the Trident nuclear deterrent, the Dreadnought class, has been agreed and the future of the shipyard seems assured for another twenty years at least.

"Seems assured," but nothing is certain. Almost immediately after the election there were press reports of a Defence Spending Review led by Dominic Cummings. He is angry at waste and inefficiency in MoD procurement, which he thinks is typified by the £6.2 billion spent on Britain's two new aircraft carriers. There are also worries about the Astute programme. Its technical complexity  has led to long delays and cost overruns. There is no guarantee that the final boats will be delivered on time in 2026 and, apart from the cost, any overrun could impact on the delivery of the Trident successor programme.

Given the Conservative record in government of abandoning the shipyard whenever it suits them and the continuing need for cost cutting, with the Chancellor seeking across the board cuts of 5% from most government departments as we return to austerity now the election is won, it is no surprise that the Barrow and Furness Labour Party should be concerned for the future of the town and for Chris Altree to write to our MP stating that:

“Like you, we champion the superb skills of our shipyard personnel and it is hard to overstate the importance of maintaining our nation’s defence capabilities in an increasingly unpredictable world.

“We are therefore asking you to speak directly to government ministers to obtain assurances that no shipyard jobs will be adversely affected by the review."  

 And how does Fell respond?

“It’s staggering that the local Labour Party has gone from being a champion of the shipyard to scaremongering and talking down the work it does.

"Who on earth does this serve? Following the lead of Jeremy Corbyn, it is clear that the Labour Party has strayed far from its roots and would now rather bash our local economy than talk it up. "How very sad.”

How very sad indeed, Mr Fell, that genuine concerns, provoked by the actions of your government should be met with such distortion and spin and attempts at political point scoring.

UPDATE
Thank you to comrades in Barrow and Furness Labour Party for sharing this story in yesterday's Times. This is Downing Street's senior advisor. Well Mr Fell, what do you think of Dominic Cummings proposals. Is he "scaremongering and talking down" our shipyard?

Tim Shipman, Political Editor

Sunday February 09 2020, 12.01am GMT

BAE SYSTEMS/PA WIRE

Dominic Cummings has turned his fire on a new target, threatening to take on two of Britain’s biggest defence companies for “ripping off the taxpayer”.

Boris Johnson’s senior aide chaired a meeting last week on the government’s strategic defence and security review and vowed to tear up defence procurement rules.

Sources said he singled out BAE Systems, Britain’s leading defence firm, and Babcock, which is responsible for building the Royal Navy’s two aircraft carriers as well as a generation of submarines.

In exchanges that became “heated”, Cummings urged officials to stop funnelling taxpayers’ money into expensive projects that frequently overrun in both time and costs.

He is said to want to see fewer “bespoke” defence projects and for Britain to buy “off the shelf” from other countries.

The meeting, which was held without the knowledge of some senior figures in the Ministry of Defence, saw a showdown between Cummings and senior officials in the Cabinet Office, who questioned his approach.

In a sign of growing tensions between Johnson’s political aides and the civil service, officials pointed out that buying off the shelf would destroy Britain’s last remaining shipbuilding capability and leave the armed forces dependent on kit from America.

One Whitehall source said: “BAE was the focus of Cummings’s ire. He thinks these defence companies are ‘taking the piss’ out of the taxpayer but that approach isn’t terribly helpful.”

Officials went toe to toe with Cummings, pointing out that there was not much point in starting a strategic defence review until Britain had decided its foreign policy stance on key strategic issues such as China, Iran and the Middle East.

They also pointed out that any commitment to buy more US equipment should not be entered into from a position of weakness but negotiated as part of a free trade deal with the United States.

The exchanges were seen by those present as further evidence of a culture clash between Johnson’s team and their officials.

“Some of them are beginning to realise that governing is about more than just saying things should happen and then having them happen,” said one source. “It’s more complicated than they first thought.”

© Times Newspapers Limited 2020.