This Wednesday, 300 trade unionists from Royal Ordnance, the
arms company privatised in 1987 and now run by British Aerospace, lobbied
Parliament in a last-ditch attempt to stave off factory closures that will put
up to 2,500 workers on the dole.
It is unlikely that their campaign will succeed. Royal
Ordnance workers are just the latest in a long list of arms industry
supplicants, for, in the wake of the ending of the cold war, the market for
Britain's arms industries has collapsed. Aerospace, shipbuilding, fighting
vehicles and fefence electronics have all been hit. Trade unions estimate that,
since the Berlin Wall came down, some 120,000 workers in the defence industries
have lost their jobs, half of them in aerospace alone. Another 120,000 or so in
related industries have lost their jobs as a result. Many thousands more
redundancies are in the pipeline.
Unlike miners, defence industry workers do not readily
command public sympathy for their plight. The arms industry is generally
considered a nasty business. On the left, anti-militarism has often proved more
deep-rooted than concern for workers losing their livelihoods.
Yet the crisis in the defence industry is not something that
can be shrugged off or ignored. The military sector has taken a
disproportionate role in the British economy since the industrial revolution;
in recent years, it has been the single most important British manufacturing
sector. Between 1980 and 1990, the share of industrial production taken by
the defence industries grew from 6 per cent to 11 per cent.
Most crucially, the defence sector has been an oasis of high
technology in the desert of "low-tech, no-tech" Britain. The defence
jobs that are being lost are highly skilled: in aerospace, three professionally
qualified engineers have been made redundant for every blue-collar worker.
There is a real danger that the collapse of the defence sector will shrink for
ever the skills base of the British economy.
Labour's response to all this has been entirely inadequate.
Instead of arguing forcefully that the defence industry crisis shows the
desperate need for an interventionist industrial policy, Labour frontbenchers
have done little but refer apologetically to the party's proposal for a defence
diversification agency to manage the transition from military to civilian
production.
The reason for this sorry story is simple: no substantial
detailed work has been done on the policy for nearly a year and the Labour front
bench knows it. The unions are quite right to be telling the party that it is
time to get its finger out.
