Corbyn calls for navy shipbuilding contracts to stay in the UK

Today Jeremy Corbyn will use a speech in Glasgow to call for Navy shipbuilding contracts to stay in the UK.

Celebrating the “proud tradition” of British shipyard workers who build “the best ships in the world”, Corbyn is set to attack the government’s decision to offer up a £1bn contract for three new Fleet Solid Support Ships to foreign companies. He says the Tories are “trashing” tradition.

The Labour leader will warn: “By refusing to help our industry thrive, the Conservatives are continuing their historic trend of hollowing out and closing down British industry. Over the course of the 1980s under the Tories, 75,000 jobs were lost in UK shipyards, leaving just 32,000 remaining.

“Our shipyards used to produce half of all new ships worldwide. Our current market share is now less than half a per cent. The Tories seem hell-bent on accelerating and deepening this industrial decline.”

The contract could lead to over 6,500 jobs in the UK, 1,800 of those in shipyards – but only if the ships are built in Britain and not put out to international tender later this month as planned. Making the protectionist case for offering the contract to British companies only, Corbyn will argue that government intervention would defend the industry from “anti-competitive practices by overseas firms and other states”.

Corbyn will say: “The next Labour government will use public contracts as part of our bigger plans to upgrade our economy. Don’t listen to anyone who says we can’t build things in Britain and that a casino economy, which produces little but soaring inequality and insecurity, is our only future. Shipbuilding is not a lame duck, and can have a high tech, high skilled and exciting future right here in the UK.

“We can make sure that happens, but only if we reject the Tories’ outdated free market obsession that gives the whip hand to out-of-control multinational companies and doesn’t care about the everyday needs and wishes of workers and consumers.

“The government claims that it is overseeing a ‘renaissance’ in British shipbuilding. But Scottish employers have pushed through one set of redundancies after another in recent years. Our proposal would both sustain existing shipbuilding and supply chain jobs, and create new ones –  right here in Scotland and also across the UK.”

Corbyn’s full-throated support of protectionist policy follows a recent campaign by Unite and GMB that called for blue post-Brexit passports to be made in the UK. In the end, the contract did go to a Franco–Dutch firm, but the campaign got Labour’s support.

As the party strives to compete with the SNP and Ruth Davidson’s popularity in Scotland, the patriotic tone Corbyn strikes today may evoke nostalgia for when Clydeside was red.

The narrative could also appeal to small town and working class voters. The latest YouGov research showed the Tories are currently ahead with those in the ‘C2DE’ social grade, with 43 per cent versus Labour’s 40 per cent.

Sienna @siennamarla

Sign up to LabourList’s morning email for everything Labour, every weekday morning.