The Dateline London foreign correspondents get to the heart of the shipbuilding jobs decision, recognising that it was Scottish politicians who made it political - and we know which ones - Iain Davidson and Alistair Carmichael, the so-called Scottish Secretary ... NESRINE MALIK: It did start out as a non-political decision, but has become politicised - by Scottish politicians. ---- It was the Scottish politicians who said If you do vote for independence, we will ensure that shipbuilding stays in the UK ... (She means rUK!) I can do no better than quote from Iain Macwhirters superb analysis in the Sunday Herald, part of eight pages of insightful coverage of the complexities to the decision-making processes that so cruelly affected Portsmouth, Govan and Scotstoun shipyards. IAIN MACWHIRTER (Sunday Herald) The UK Government relied on the tribalism of Scottish politics and the willingness of anti-nationalist politicians to trash their own nests to create a climate of uncertainty around Scottish shipbuilding at the moment it won the security that eluded the Clyde for decades. There was an inability to recognise Scotland won for a change. Perhaps it is a kind of industrial defeatism Scotland has got so used to industrial closures we expect them. There is a parallel here with the Grangemouth petrochemical plant. The dispute there should never have been allowed to become a closure issue, and in allowing it to, the unions involved seemed to follow a 1980s script in which the workers always go down to heroic failure
Posted on: Mon, 11 Nov 2013 00:39:12 +0000
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