There’s nothing like a factory occupation to set lefties’ hearts aflutter.
The idea of workers taking control of the means of production has the romance of the biennio rosso, the ‘two red years’ 1920-21 when Italian workers occupied car factories in Turin, or the heroism of the work-in by the shipbuilders on the Upper Clyde in 1971, with Tony Benn and Jimmy Reid leading the demonstrations. Factory occupations are to working class activism what signing a petition or spending a night at a peace camp is to middle class activism. Proper workers often find their efforts emulated by wannabe proletarians on campus, with students occupying university buildings to abolish capitalism, fix the Middle East conflict, or avoid writing essays.
It is little surprise then that the occupation by workers at the Vestas wind turbine factory on the Isle of Wight has attracted the support of Tony Benn, John McDonnell MP, Trotskyists in the guise of Workers’ Liberty and the Socialist Workers Party, and various trade union branches around the UK. Bob Crow has signed the workers (hitherto non-unionised) up as members of the RMT. By the weekend we can expect a benefit concert by Billy Bragg and a supportive Guardian feature by Seamus Milne. Even Jill Mountford, a life-long Trotskyist who once stabbed me in the leg with a fork at an event at Kings College, London, and who is standing against Harriet Harman at the next election, has expressed her solidarity.
With support like this from across the labour and trade union movement, you might predict that Vestas will join a long line of heroic labour defeats, joining the miners’ strike, the general strike, CND and Peterloo in the roll-call of failure. But this is not a moment for cynicism; this is a moment to disengage the Vestas workers’ core argument from its barmy army of advocates.
Applying cold logic, aside from ideology or romance, it is clear that closing a factory where people make the blades for wind turbines just weeks after the Labour government restated its commitment to a low carbon economy is just plain stupid. Jobs and expertise will be lost in the very sector – green technology – that ministers are always telling us will be the national salvation and the legacy of the recession. You can see why Ed Miliband is wringing his hands. In a response to campaigners over at LabourList he says:
‘Vestas have repeatedly told us that offers of government subsidy were not the issue for them. The factory makes a different sized blade to the ones used in Britain, so each one it makes is shipped to the US. They wanted to have their production in America to cut some of that journeyTheir biggest difficulty is with planning objections to onshore wind turbines, which have slowed down the growth in the UK market. That is why we are reforming the planning rules and are arguing strongly that people need to see climate change as a bigger threat to the countryside than the wind turbine.
We are unlikely to be a centre for onshore wind production if applications are consistently turned down. Analysis in the Guardian on Monday reported that Tory councils have blocked 70% of proposals for onshore wind schemes.’
So there you have it, it’s all the Tories fault.
I was a special adviser at the department for communities and local government, and in my experience the planning system is indeed calamitously unsuited to the urgency of tackling climate change. Ministers would argue that the reforms to the planning system currently going through parliament will help. But I suspect that Tory councils are stymieing applications for wind farms, not because they are Tory, but because they are councils. Most councils in rural areas are small-c conservative by nature, and unlikely to take bold action on climate change if it offends local farmers and land-owners. With the Tories in control of virtually every local authority covering a potential site for wind turbines, it is no great surprise that ‘Tory councils have blocked 70% of proposals for onshore wind schemes’. Indeed I would happily hear from a Progress reader who can name a Labour council in a part of the country where you could build onshore wind turbines on any scale.
We’ll have to do better than blaming Tory councils.
Does the answer lie in nationalising Vestas? Although Labour ministers may have developed a taste for it after Northern Rock and the North East railway, there’s a big difference between the government taking a controlling stake in UK-based institutions and companies, and seizing the assets of a company with its HQ in the Jutland Peninsula, not Newcastle. Taking foreign-owned companies into state control can get you into trouble: just ask Colonel Nasser.
What about some kind of workers’ co-operative? That’s what some, for example Labour’s candidate in Brighton Nancy Platt, have been calling for. I’m all in favour of co-ops and mutuals of all shapes and sizes (who isn’t?). But the Vestas factory in Newport doesn’t make fully-formed wind turbines, which roll off the assembly line and get delivered to a field near you. The company was making 40-meter blades for its V82 turbine, but has decided to make the 44-meter blades for the new V90 turbine in the United States because the market there is better. So it is hard to see how a worker-owned co-op on the Isle of Wight could go it alone, making 40-meter blades that nobody, except possibly Antony Gormley, has a use for.
The unpalatable truth is that Vestas will close – not because of the recession, but because of decisions taken in Randers, Denmark, and because although Vestas make wind turbines (good), they are operating in the capitalist system (bad). The lesson for Labour is not to try and save Vestas. It is to build fifty new factories in the UK which deliver the next generation of wind turbines, which are owned by UK plc, and are not subject to vagaries of the Danes or anyone else.
Over to you, Ed.