5 days ago
Paul Sweeney: 'Shipbuilding has bright future in Glasgow'
As a boy, I remember pressing my face up to the glass cabinets to see the amazing ship models at the Transport Museum.
My papa worked at John Brown's in Clydebank building the QE2, and my dad worked at Yarrow Shipbuilders in Scotstoun.
The sense of community and collective pride as thousands gathered to watch a vast wall of steel rumbling down the slipway into the river on launch days has imprinted itself on my subconscious.
Building these great ships matters to Glaswegians.
Although we don't launch ships in quite such a dramatic way these days, I recently had the privilege of attending the naming ceremony for the first of eight Type 26 frigates built at that same shipyard in Scotstoun for the Royal Navy by BAE Systems.
The first ship is aptly named HMS Glasgow – a salute to the city and the people who made her.
I was there as a representative of our city, but before I was elected to Parliament, I followed in my family tradition by working in the Clyde shipyards, and I worked on the early design for the new class of Type 26 frigates as well as the modernisation plan for the shipyard facilities at both Govan and Scotstoun, so it was a particularly proud moment for me to be there with my old colleagues to witness the culmination of our great collective endeavour.
Most Glaswegians will have a family member or know someone who is, or was, a Clyde shipbuilder – it is part of our city's foundation myth.
But equally, everyone also knows someone who felt the hardship and humiliation as many of our shipyards closed and laid people off during the period of deindustrialisation in the 1970s and 1980s.
Although those scars still linger in many of our social problems, times have changed, and the future of shipbuilding on the Clyde is more positive than it has been for many years.
With seven more ships in the pipeline for the Royal Navy and hopefully the biggest export contract Glasgow has ever seen, with a potential deal to build Type 26 ships for the Norwegian Navy to be finalised in the next few weeks, there is real confidence in Glasgow's shipbuilding industry today.
A continuous conveyor belt of ship orders will sustain thousands of skilled and well-paid jobs for Glaswegians.
These jobs are integral to the UK's defence, and Glaswegian workers should rightly be proud of that.
BAE Systems and the UK Government have ploughed £300 million into modernising Clyde shipbuilding, most notably with the vast new indoor shipbuilding assembly hall at Govan Shipyard, named after the pioneering WW2 electrician Janet Harvey, officially opening later this month.
One of Britain's largest buildings, this tremendous facility will allow for uninterrupted indoor ship construction and higher productivity so that the shipyard can compete with the best shipbuilding facilities in the world.
On top of that, BAE has opened a brand-new Applied Shipbuilding Academy at Scotstoun Shipyard, which will help underpin workforce skills for years to come.
These new investments will now be boosted by the commitment that the new UK Labour Government is making in our defence, rebuilding the Royal Navy after years of Tory cuts.
While the UK Government is investing in the future of shipbuilding in the west of Scotland – still the region's biggest manufacturing employer – the SNP Scottish Government's own procurement agency awards CalMac ferry contracts to Turkey and Poland, disregarding social value for the Scottish supply chain.
And just this week, while the Prime Minister was in Govan Shipyard announcing new funding for the industry as part of the Strategic Defence Review, the SNP withdrew public funding for a new shipbuilding welding skills centre on the Clyde being developed by Rolls-Royce and Strathclyde University.
Not only is it industrially naive, but it's hypocritical, too.
The only thing keeping the Scottish Government-owned Ferguson Marine shipyard at Port Glasgow open is subcontract work from BAE Systems Naval Ships for the Royal Navy's Type 26 frigate programme.
Scottish Enterprise also recently grant funded the Applied Shipbuilding Academy in Scotstoun, so far from this being a cast iron principle, the SNP policy on state support for defence projects is also selectively applied.
The First Minister, John Swinney, needs to quickly get a grip of economic and geopolitical reality by formally ditching his government's juvenile policy of industrial self-sabotage and work with the new Labour government to back Glasgow's world-class shipbuilding industry.
