Tuesday 15 April 2014

The B In BAE

This Government hates Britain, ending 800 years of shipbuilding in England, 500 of them at the oldest dry dock in the world, the one at Portsmouth.

Of course no contracts would go to the Clyde, or anywhere else in Scotland, if Scotland became independent. That is a statement of the blatantly obvious. But it ought still to be written into the contracts themselves: that they would be void in that event.

Defence procurement is an integral part of defence. Bring it all in-house, to a BAE restored as the publicly owned monopoly supplier to our own Armed Forces, accompanied by a total ban on the sale of arms abroad and the use of government action to preserve the skills base while diverting its application to other uses.

Like renationalising the railways, or forcibly splitting retail and investment banking, you will say that I am mad and illiterate until it happens. Then you will pretend to have thought of it yourselves.

That said, the people now running the party that is guaranteed to win the next General Election, the party that has voted against this Government's defence cuts and which has sought to moderate the effects of its persecution of military families, have never accused me of being either mad or illiterate.

3 comments:

  1. Scotland is leaving. Get over it.

    And they'll keep the pound too, for all the empty bluster.

    The momentum is with Salmond.

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  2. Except that it isn't.

    There is no chance of a currency union, so you are left with the idea of a country having an enormous financial services sector but no lender of last resort.

    Of course, that is never going to happen. People are not daft.

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  3. To those in the know, that's all just business bluffing.

    The big companies threatening to leave, London saying Scotland can't keep the pound.

    All empty attempts at blackmail by Big a Business that will come to nothing when Scotland is independent.

    And Salmond has sealed the deal by borrowing Ed Milibands policy of giving 16 year old kids a vote.

    They are much more pro-separatist even than the 18-30s.

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