Saturday 30 May 2009

Little Hope for Vauxhall

Never again do working people in this country want to stand on the sidelines while their industrial future is decided by the German Government, an Italian car maker and an AustroCanadian parts manufacturer backed by a Russian oligarch and a state-supported Russian bank.

Labour is not funded by the trade unions and elected by working people to be a power base for the ambitions of global post democratic governance apparatchiks. There hasn't been the slightest attempt to force the inclusion of the many countries' workers involved in the General Motors collapse in the US/GM/German/FIAT/Magna negotiations. Now Mandelson starts to ask for job guarantees, tries to tie them onto potential government funding, pretends to be in the know.

No he isn't. All ready Magna are raising the numbers of jobs that must be lost from 300 to at least 11,000. All ready German plants are secure but no other country can say other than that there is excess capacity and we all knew that, as Mandelson now admits. At least FIAT offered an industrial solution to an industrial problem, and told it as it is. And with FIAT the job losses would have been fewer. How long before the German workers find they too have lost the jobs and, as well, have been mulcted of nearly two billion euros by an oligarch, a Russian state bank, and a motor parts manufacturer?

Our governing regime is nothing to do with Labour and everything to do with political elitist individualism.

4 comments:

dearieme said...

The fate of our car workers was decided decades ago by the Unions of the car industry.

hatfield girl said...

Red Robbo, Arthur Scargill, their name is Legion, the betrayers of the working people.

It was dominant Communist Party policy to infiltrate to positions of power within primarily the trade unions but as well any part of the Labour movement. They couldn't get elected into Parliament - the last one was some time in the 1940s - but they could overpower union branches and local groupings and drive them into the ground with constant, prolonged meetings and packing votes etc.

Brown is a true heir if from another tradition.

Malthebof said...

Asset stripping will take place, to Russia. Luton & Ellesmere Port will be closed within two years. I am not a soothsayer or a prophet.

hatfield girl said...

M, Both are merely assembly lines. There is no research or development, no real car industry at all. And despite UK workers being easier and cheaper to make redundant than other member-state workers, there is no way assembly line plants can be cheaper to run here than in Russia.

There was some point that an industrial plan, like FIAT's might have had industrial reasons for production capacity being maintained in the UK, but the GM settlement for Europe is political. It's faintly unnerving to see Germany and Russia allying so blatantly. But I suppose the same could be said if Germany and Italy had done the deal, even though that deal really made car industry sense. Certainly the Axis powers are telling us what's what. I suppose that's what the unease echo is about. The German Chancellor and the Russian Leader settling things for their mutual benefit and their different goals, none of which we can affect.