Search topics on this blog

Showing posts with label Dateline London. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dateline London. Show all posts

Sunday 10 November 2013

Shipbuilding and its politicisation by Iain Davidson and Alistair Carmichael – a media view …

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 Macwhirter''s 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"

But back in March 2012, what were they saying?