In my earlier post about current polling showing little evidence of people changing their opinion on Brexit I thought about this report in The Guardian (HERE) following the warnings from Airbus. It concerns an employee of Airbus at the main site in Broughton where wings are manufactured. He is a David Lawless aged 34, so a man who has spent all his life under the EU.
Mr Lawless voted to leave in the EU referendum, “I was in two minds. I wanted to leave but obviously a lot of people were asking questions before about if we were to leave, how it would affect us,”
He can't be accused of hankering after a long lost golden past, unless his parents have convinced him life was much better pre-1973. He said the news of Airbus's warning had come as a shock but had a mixed reaction from workers:
"A lot of people are brushing it off and saying it won’t happen, it’s just talk, but the reality is companies are folding before Brexit has even happened. I don’t know what is going to happen here. We just need to try and stick together and hope that the government will fight for us." "People were saying it would never affect us here because it’s too big a company".
He seems like a soft leaver, someone who wavered between remaining and leaving, admitting he was in two minds before voting but now, because of the way he voted, his entire future is at much greater risk than it was before. One would have though he was a prime candidate for regretting his vote. But stunningly he says:
"I’m still happy I voted for it but I thought we had more of a hold and a footing here in Broughton.”
This is what we're up against. Here's a man who voted for something so nebulous (regain sovereignty, take back control) as to be meaningless, finds out he has put his own livelihood and that of perhaps another 100,000 people at risk, but doesn't regret it. I wonder if, as he enters the job centre or the local food bank in a few years time, his fellow unemployed aerospace workers will agree with him? Will he be demanding the government "invest" in North Wales to bring jobs to the region?
In the sixties, the Labour government had a real interventionist industrial policy which, among other things, involved financial incentives to move companies to areas of high unemployment. So, we found a Dunlop tyre factory and a Triumph car plant being built on Merseyside, which then became synonymous with chronic industrial relations and repetitive strike action by employees. Needless to say they also thought they had "more of a hold and a footing" than they actually had.
The plants closed very quickly (HERE) and local people again began to demand the government do something to incentivise companies to move to Liverpool, apparently without the self awareness to see they themselves had driven the companies away.
In the 1980s, Mrs Thatcher persuaded Nissan to open a plant in Sunderland to access the lucrative EU market but a majority of voters there opted to leave the EU, again thinking they have "more of a hold and a footing" than perhaps they have. We will see.
Both Airbus and Nissan have invested a lot in the UK and they may end up staying but will they start to look at investment elsewhere? Probably. Will it mean less investment here? Almost certainly.
My question to the workers would have been - why risk it? But this is what they did. The next decade will show whether those areas are going to be like Speke or not.
