CLYDEBANK CRISIS Labour challenge defeated

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32676, 4 August 1971, Page 17

CLYDEBANK CRISIS Labour challenge defeated

(NXP.A.-X«u*«r—CopvrtjhO GLASGOW, August 3. The 2500 Clydebank shipyard workers toiled at top speed yesterday while accustations were being made in Parliament that one of the world’s great cradles of steel ships was becoming a ghost town.

The Clydebank men took over the yards after the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders consortium’s monetary crisis had led to a Government decision last week to close two of the group’s three main shipbuilding centres, pending an investigation by an official roccivsr. Union leaders have called the Prime Minister (Mr Heath), “ a hatchet man out to kill the industry," and say that they are determined to go on working at all costs. In the Commons debate yesterday, Mr Heath was described by Opposition Labour members as- “the man who forgot the people.” Labour’s challenge was to force a vote on the issue, but it was defeated by 280 votes to 247. Opposition member* had said that the closing of the two yards could add another 15,000 to the expected Scottish unemployment figure of 100,000 this Christmas. The Minister of Trade (Mr John Davies), said that the workers’ take-over was a fatal mistake,.and that the Labour Shadow Minister of Trade, Mr Anthony Wedgewood Benn, had incited the men to take the action. “I deplore what he has been doing,” Mr Davies said. "I understand the men’s emotion of dismay and shock, but I am quite sure they are mak-

ing a fatal mistake, and are doing things which will lead, in the end, to their own great

disadvantage. “I think Mr Benn ha* been in some sense the evil genius of shipbuilding, and indeed, the evil genius of a number of other industrial ventures.”

Mr Davies described the speech made by Mr Benn in opening the debate a* “an extremely complicated alibi, entirely inaccurate and reflecting the failure of Mr Benn to recognise his own resnonsibUities.’* Mr Benn had said that the Government’s policy on Clyde shipbuilding was “a massive betrayal of men working in the consortium.” "It makes no industrial or economic sense,” he said. "The charge that I make on behalf of the opposition is a grave one. It is that the Prime Minister and the Government was determined to destroy the consortium from the start. “The Government was deliberately sentencing thousands of people to a slow and living death of long-term unemployment in the wasteland of West Central Scotland that the Government has decided to create. “The Prime Minister’s epitaph will be that he is the man who forgot the people —end the people will never forgive him for that.”