JOHN BROWN, ROLLS ROYCE AND CONCORDE
We still await a clear statement of the Government's economic and industrial policy, although its fiscal and financial policy is now taking recognizable shape under the Chancellor of the Exchequer. This week we have been confronted by what amounts to a government decision not to bale out Upper Clyde Shipbuilders and to allow the celebrated old firm of John Brown to go to the wall. At the same time, the Government has been extremely pleased that as a result of a United States Senate resolution carried by one vote, further financing will become available for the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation and consequently further hope may be extended for the Rolls-Royce workers and designers making the RB 211 engines for the Lockheed TriStar. This may well mean that Britain will have to continue baling Rolls-Royce out, and not allowing its aircraft engine division to go to the wall. The Government continues to prop up, at far greater cost to public funds, the Concorde project.
John Brown, the firm which built the Queens, has been written off: the Government's decision on the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders consortium means the death and the funeral of that famous yard. Rolls-Royce occupies in the English industrial mythology a position akin to John Brown in Scotland. Now, it appears that the Government will snatch at any straw, such as that so hesitantly held out by the United States Senate, to avoid applying to Rolls-Royce the stern principles it has applied to John Brown and had hitherto seemed determined to apply to Rolls-Royce. Sentence of death is passed, and being carried out, on the Clyde. The passing of such sentence, let alone the execution, is now indefinitely delayed in Derby; and there is relief and rejoicing in the back streets of Derby, and anger and despair in Glasgow and Clydebank.
There may be something in the argument, and much will be made of it, that the aero engine industry is a vital national interest and that it produces valuable technical 'spin-off' and that Rolls-Royce is potentially profitable, whereas there is no vital national interest in shipbuilding, which produces no comparable ' spin-off ' and which can never be profitable on the Upper Clyde. But this argument sounds thin. Scotland's vital national interest may be more closely bound up with the Upper Clyde than is England's with Rolls-Royce; there is a great deal of social and industrial, if not technical, spin-off ' from great shipyards; and to judge from the latest published report of the Industrial Reorganisation Corporation, there is no more reason to believe in the eventual profitability of Rolls-Royce than there is in that of UCS, while there is every reason to assume that to keep baling out Rolls-Royce will cost far more in the future (as it has already cost far more in the past) than to prop up UCS.
Very grave suspicions and doubts must begin to assail anyone who considers the Government's treatment of RollsRoyce at the same time as he considers its treatment of Upper Clyde Shipbuilders. Can clarification be sought from considering the treatment of Concorde? The achievement represented by the building of Concorde is remarkable. The beautiful aircraft is now flying; it is a notable example of co-operation between the industries of two countries; it is ahead of its time, and although nobody may want it, it will undoubtedly create a market for further supersonic passenger aircraft; it is a spectacular piece of engineering. However, no one has ever really pretended that it will make a profit. The vast sums of public money that have been spent on it, and will continue to be spent on it, will never be recouped; and are only to be justified on the grounds of technical `spin-off,' of a presumed defence need to preserve an air-frame industry, and of a political desire to do something together with the French. These are very thin grounds. The technical• byproducts of the aerospace and space industries are of negligible importance, and could anyway have been produced directly at far less cost. If there is a national defence need to maintain an airframe industry, then that is better maintained by malting military rather than civilian aircraft. This leaves the French argument. This has been and remains the politically decisive consideration that keeps the Concorde programme going.
Opinions will, and indeed do, differ as to how much we should pay to keep the French sweet: but it cannot seriously be disputed that part of such payment is the continuance of the Concorde project, just as, if the Government has its way, our contributions by way of higher food prices through the Common Agricultural Policy will be another part of what we will pay as sweeteners to France. The Government, like its predecessors, has decided that although the Concorde cannot possibly make economic sense, it makes political sense. This is the kind of decision governments are continually required to make, and do make, the main difference being that some governments make them more willingly than others.
When a government sometimes intervenes and sometimes does not, sometimes props up and sometimes does not, it follows that its decisions whether to do so or not are political. Just as .this Government has taken the political decision to continue with Concorde, so it took the political decision first to let Rolls-Royce go to the wall and now to subsidize the RB 211 engine, and so it has taken the political decision to close some of the shipyards on the Upper Clyde including John Brown. UCS is politically expendable, Rolls-Royce is a borderline case, Concorde is not expendable.
There is nothing surprising about these priorities; nor indeed is there anything bemusing about the apparent con tradictions contained in the Government's economic and•industrial policy. The priorities and the policy are decided with Europe constantly in mind. A government with its feet planted firmly in the Midlands and south-east England and looking longingly across the Channel cannot help but turn its back upon Scotland, the north-east, the north-west, Northern Ireland and Wales. Parts of the development areas will become depressed areas and derelict areas: and it is a political decision whether to allow this process to continue, whether to seek to ameliorate it by retraining and emigration of labour, or whether to attempt to reverse it with policies designed to reinvigorate those areas upon which the industrial strength of this country was based. We do not argue that old and decayed or worn-out industries should be propped up by endless Government subsidy. Such a policy must in the long run impoverish the nation. We do argue that the energies of this, or of any other British government should be able to be placed fully, and without restrictions, at the service of each and every part of the nation, and should so be placed. It is impossible to avoid the conclusions that the energies of this Government are not placed fully where they ought to be; and that if this Government has its way, no future British government will be able to place its energies fully and without restrictions at the service of any particular part of the nation.
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