THIS BETRAYAL IS CREATING A SCOTTISH RUST BELT
ON Wednesday evening, the Scottish parliament made its view clear. Opposition parties – Tories, Greens, Liberals – united in support of a Labour party call to save the BiFab yard in Fife. They demanded that the SNP Government take action.
It came three years, almost to the day, since workers from the yard staged a memorable protest outside the parliament over the potential closure of their yard.
Their efforts led to a rescue package from the Government and promises of a secured future.
Yet those promises and guarantees of SNP ministers are now being broken. And the votes of our MSPs are being ignored.
Instead, the SNP is failing our workers. And for all the bold talk that the party would turn Scotland into a ‘Saudi Arabia of renewables’, the reality is very different.
IN the West, the SNP has presided over half-finished ferries on the Clyde. In the East, we now see mothballed yards at Methil and Burntisland in the Forth. The SNP is turning the Central Belt into a manufacturing rust belt, with jobs and communities suffering.
What has happened to BiFab is, bluntly, a betrayal.
I look out on Burntisland from my window. I went to school with the children of the shipyard’s workers and I have worked with employers and staff at BiFab for all the 32 years I was a Fife MP, and ever since.
BiFab - Burntisland Shipbuilders - has existed since 1918 when it started to help war production. It survived the depression of the 1930s, the
Second World War, and the shift from shipbuilding to North Sea oil platform production.
Now it was ready to play a major part in making the North Sea a Green Sea – producing wind jackets for the massive wind turbines we were told would not only make Scotland a global leader in wave power, but would also provide much needed manufacturing jobs onshore.
BiFab has been so big a part of the Burntisland community and our country that its own football team formed in the 1920s, as Burntisland Shipyard, still is guaranteed a place in the qualifying round of the Scottish Cup. A year ago, I lobbied the giant energy company [EDF] so that BiFab could secure some of the 4 wind j ackets i t was ordering for its wind farm not far off Burntisland in the North Sea. While we won only eight, it was a foothold in what should be a booming market for the future. The SNP Government joined with Canadian firm DF Barnes, which was to provide the technical expertise to secure BiFab’s future. The Government
agreed to provide a guarantee. Yet with no warning, and without a proper explanation, that guarantee was withdrawn in September.
That decision was taken in the full knowledge that administration would be the inevitable result.
First the SNP blamed Europe – the EU states aid regime.
Then it blamed the UK Government – its energy pricing policy.
Yesterday, Economy Secretary Fiona Hyslop tried to turn the finger of blame back towards the parent company in Canada.
None of the claims stand up, for BiFab had actually won a £30million contract to supply wind jackets, guaranteeing 400-500 jobs.
That contract was sealed and ready to be delivered.
The only reason it now cannot be fulfilled is because the SNP has torn up its guarantee.
So much for the SNP standing up for our national interest.
Forget the SNP’s bluster, a Scottish company that won a major North Sea order to support Scotland’s renewables revolution is being prevented from doing so by the Scottish Government.
Not that the UK Government avoids blame, either.
Whitehall could easily have stepped in to provide support – yet it, too, is allowing BiFab to go the wall, with most, if not all, of the North Sea wind jackets now to be built in Indonesia, thousands of miles away.
Behind this fiasco is a wider failure – that, despite the alleged benefits of Brexit, both governments are
‘I will not give up without a fight. A future is possible’
failing to deliver a home-grown industrial strategy which allows manufacturing firms here a chance to compete against cheaper rivals in Asia.
Devolution should have seen our two governments working together. In the case of BiFab, the failure to do so kills a great Scottish firm, and made a mockery of our plans for a ‘green revolution’.
It is not too late, however. I’ve talked to the company. It is keen to undertake the contract and will work with whoever can help deliver the Fife jobs we need.
The Scottish parliament voted on Wednesday for action now to resuscitate the contract, to get the work to Fife and work out, as they do so, a new industrial strategy to win jobs in the North Sea on our doorstep.
If I were in London and Edinburgh, I would agree a joint guarantee for the contract in hand.
This would allow BiFab to go ahead with the work on its order book.
It would also provide space and time for all of the parties involved to plan a longer-term future for the company.
For as long as I have lived in Fife, Burntisland Fabrications has been a fixture of the local community. Now it is being thrown to the wolves.
Scottish shipyard workers are famous for fighting for their jobs and I will be with Gary Smith and Pat Rafferty and the workers’ representatives, for I will not do what the Scottish Government has done and give up without a fight.
A future still is possible – but it requires Nicola Sturgeon and Boris Johnson to find common cause for once and act.