I pleaded a doctor’s appointment for 3.30 in the afternoon. In which case, I could be on a train by 4pm. As if I didn’t know. By handing a £1.4 billion contract for new Thameslink trains to the German firm of Siemens, Transport Secretary Philip Hammond and Business Secretary Vince Cable had effectively signed the death warrant of Britain’s last train maker, Bombardier. The Canadian-owned firm announced that half the workforce of 3,000 would be made redundant within three months. It was a body blow to a city whose name is synonymous with railways.
They have been building locomotives and carriages in Derby since 1840, when the North Midland Railways set up its headquarters there. Coach (they’re called “cars” these days, American-style) manufacture was moved to a virgin site on Litchurch Lane in 1873, and has continued uninterrupted ever since, except for a wartime visit from a different rival German transport firm, Zeppelin, in 1916.
Until now, that is. Bombardier, the world’s largest train-maker with 33,000 transportation employees, has owned the firm for 10 years,. It has a record of innovation second to none , model industrial relations (nobody can remember a strike) and a track record (if you don’t mind the pun) for delivering on time, to budget and to customer satisfaction. It has exported all round the world. The president of Gabon ordered his private train from Derby, although there is no record of him ever driving it.
But none of that is good enough. Bombardier fell foul of European Union procurement rules, say the Con-Dems, which require all contracts over £100,000 to go to the lowest bidder. Regulations that were negotiated by Labour, insists Hammond. So it’s all Lord Mandelson’s fault. Really? I’m quite willing to believe that millionaire playboy Mandy sold us down the river, but German firms seem to have no difficulty in buying German. Or the Italians, Italian, and the French, French. They are rules, not the laws of the Medes and Persians, as the late Frank Chapple used to say of his union rules.
And, as John Pearson, the eloquent Unite chairman of the works committee at Litchurch Lane pointed out to me, British ministers failed to take into account the socio-economic costs of throwing 1,400 men and women on the dole, dispersing a highly-qualified train design team, losing £1 million-plus a year business taxes, abandoning a successful apprenticeship programme and scrapping an academy of excellence to build the trains of the future – for export as well as home consumption.
Hammond and Cable don’t see the big picture because they don’t want to look. The Con-Dems don’t have an industrial policy. That would be anathema, wholly contrary to the Thatcherite mentality that informs the thinking of both wings of the coalition. It’s Old Labour, and they would not be seen dead wearing one.
Except, of course, that it’s politically counter-productive to have one of your top private sector firms go down the plughole while you do nothing. British jobs for German workers isn’t much of a vote-catching slogan. So, H & C (and they do blow hot and cold) say they will take another look at the procurement rules and see if they can’t be amended to give British firms a fairer crack of the whip in bidding for British contracts. They probably have an eye on the even bigger order for the London Crossrail trains, which won’t go out to contract until 2014, by which time Bombardier’s Derby plant might just be a 1980s’ style industrial desert.
There are already exemptions to the EU regulations – defence, notably – and a robust case could and should be made for such critical public procurement. But the Tories are in an ideological bind. On the one hand, their worship of the market requires them to argue that firms that can’t compete must go to the wall. That was the essence of Thatcherism, spelled out 30 years ago by Lord Young of Graffham, the Iron Lady’s favourite man in Cabinet. On the other, they hate the very idea of those bloody awful foreigners over the Channel telling a British government how to conduct its affairs. In the middle are the hapless workers whose only crime is to do the job well.
As I write, top-level talks are taking place in Derby and Whitehall, involving ministers and union leaders. This is an encouraging start. I’m not holding my breath, but the condemnation heaped on the Con-Dems from right across the political spectrum has at least woken up a Government hitherto content to rest supinely on the laurels of archaic ideology. Meanwhile, Derby’s Labour MPs Chris Williamson and Margaret Beckett are leading the biggest protest march the city has seen for many a year on July 23. Railways are in the DNA of Derby, and they will not be eliminated easily.
