By John Bean. Britain, which gave the world its railway industry, faces the collapse of its last train-making plant with the Government’s award of a £6 billion contract to German firm Siemens.
The loss of 1300 jobs in the 3,000 workforce at Bombardier’s Derby train-making plant – the last one in Britain – has already been announced and the Canadian company is considering its options of remaining in the UK.
The award was made by the Coalition’s Transport Minister Theresa Villiers, whose “PR lady” appearance and reasons she offered for the choice are more symptomatic of a high powered PR exercise for global capitalism.
Having reviewed the bids to build 1,200 new rail coaches for South-East England’s £6bn Thameslink project, she said that the Siemens deal represents the “best value for money for taxpayers,” although she said that Bombardier had also made “an attractive proposal.”
According to a newspaper report, her officials admitted that they were focussed only on the cost of rolling stock They did not consider the cost to the taxpayer of up to 3,000 lost jobs or the long-term cost of terminating an entire industry and waving goodbye to all that engineering expertise. The total knock-on effects will far exceed the marginal savings made by giving Siemens the contract.
What is puzzling is that no German or French minister would dare hand a railway equipment contract to a foreign firm – even if it was a fellow member of the EU.
It is only Britain who sacrifices local jobs and national wealth for the benefit of global capitalism. And this is not just a practice of the Tories and Liberal Democrats who form the coalition. When Labour was in power the last big contract for rail coaches went to Hitachi!
Although it did not make the front pages of the national press, several other developments took place last week which also carried the seeds of more British job losses and decline in national wealth.
Li Ka-Shing’s CKI Holdings company of Hong Kong is making a bid for Northumbrian Water. CKI is on a buying spree of British infrastructure assets that has already seen it snap up EDF’s network business in Britain for £5.8bn. As EDF is a French electrical generating company it would not allow such acquisitions in France.
CKI already owns interests in Southern Water, Cambridge Water, Suffolk and Essex Water, a Bristol power station and Northern Gas Networks.
As far as utility industries and the railways are concerned I assume it is still BNP policy (it was in the 2010 Manifesto) that these should be nationalised. French, German and most other European nation’s railways are, and run more efficiently than ours.
In general we need to make more emphasis on BNP policy that the economy should be managed for the benefit of the nation and not for the benefit of global capitalism.
Therefore we must nurture and encourage new and existing British manufacturing industries. This demands positive action, not the empty posturing given by the Lib-Lab-Con.
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[Your wish is our command. It is done. – Ed].
So much for the Conservative commitment to rebalance our economy towards manufacturing and true industry.
Having sat through an afternoon of taking notes at redundancy meetings in another company, the result of inappropiate and poor management decisions over a period of years.
I am totaly sickened by the news from today’s Bombardier’s Derby plant. How can this government allow yet another contract to go abroad, which no doubt will now be the demise of yet another British industry. To say that this government is incompetent is not enough, and it falls short of what the present and recent past leaders of this nation really are.
I question how the British nation can look on and say nothing. Why do they vote as they do? And elect as they do? Governments who would rather put all our eggs in the EU basket and ignore what the people of this nation are really asking for. My heart saddens for those who have lost their jobs and will lose their jobs. However all I can say is wake up. Why do you vote as you do. Your fate is in your hands.
My conscience is clear! I vote BNP and know perhaps in a small way I have tried. The fate of this nation however is in the hands of the British people. It is time that they relise this…..