Saturday 16 February 2008

That'll Be the Daewoo

The damaging nonsense of building two aircraft carriers in UK shipyards, one of these days or years or millennia, that Gordon Brown announces from time to virtual time, has spread to the real world.

Six naval tankers are to be built in South Korean shipyards if the contract is obtained by BAE Systems. (Herald).

"We do not have the capacity in the UK to meet the MoD requirements and deliver the first ship (by the target date) of 2012," BAE Systems stated. BAE Systems is hoping to be awarded contracts to build bits of aircraft carrier in its yards, for delivery in 2018, or 2022, or one fine day.

The tankers will be built by Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering Company should BAE, the 'lead' contractor (or front man) succeed in their bid for the contract for the ships; the contract is part of the Military Afloat Reach and Sustainability (MARS) programme.

And that will teach the Scottish ship yards what having a Scottish uppity government means. Pity about the real work, of which the yards are wholly capable, lost to the English ship yards in Barrow-in-Furness, pity that the building of aircraft carriers is beyond any UK shipbuilding capacity now but the pretence hands weapons to the Westminster regime, pity that £100 billion was wasted on a client base in the north east instead of the re-founding of manufacturing and heavy industry there.

There are always benefits and jam tomorrow.

2 comments:

Malthebof said...

We cannot make or produce anything on an industrial scale. All major manufacturing industry/plants have closed over the past 25 years. I don't know why, I sometimes think that we have no economy, how do we manage, on hairdressers and financial services. If you go to France, Germany or Italy the goods you buy are made in that country from pencils to motor cars. Is our economy an example of the Emperor's Clothes?

hatfield girl said...

We could build half a dozen naval tankers, MtB.

We cannot build a couple of aircraft carriers. Italy can, the USA certainly can, and for a fraction of the price; South Korea and Poland probably can.

But that, none of it, serves the purpose of New Labour, and its maintenance in permanent power. And the agenda of the New Labour regime does not have the interests of the United Kingdom high on the list.

UK interests would be:

- the Union

- its natural resources

- the defence of its borders

- a sound currency

- social peace encouraged by acceptable levels of wealth distribution and a meritocratic open society

- established, indigenous, cultural norms

- consistent assistance to less-privileged parts of the world

- small, highly paid, and therefore it might be hoped, honest governance and administration.

No? no.