My Preferred Bid

A friend of mine has sent me an email requesting that I sign a petition on the number10 website registering discontent with the Government’s decision to award a £7.5bn Intercity Express contract to the Japanese rail consortium Agility (which includes Hitachi Rail) rather than to the UK-based firm Bombardier. As ‘an internationalist’ my gut reaction was “Why should I support the UK over Japan?” But things turned out to be a little more complicated…

Bombardier is not a UK firm at all; it’s Canadian. But it does manufacture trains in my hometown Derby. And the Japanese consortium apparently is “British led” according to major partner John Laing, and its bid includes plans to build “a world class rolling stock manufacturing facility” in either Ashby de la Zouch (Leicestershire), Sheffield or Gateshead (but disappointingly not all three). So what we have is not a fight between Britain and Japan, but an argument between two provincial towns about where the jobs should be based. Notwithstanding the pedantic and unproven point being made by the RMT union - that more UK jobs would have been secured if the contract had been awarded to Bombardier – this seems to be a parochial matter, beneath the loftier concerns of internationalists.

OK, lofty or not, it still seems to matter to some people. The friend who forwarded me the email containing the number10 link for one. In fact I daresay that quite a few of my friends and acquaintances have friends and acquaintances of their own who work for Bombardier in Derby, and for whom the Intercity Express contract would have meant better job security. And in a previous entry on this blog I said that charity begins at home, so doesn’t the fraternal spirit on which internationalism rests begin locally, with friend helping friend, always willing to lend a hand and sign a petition on each other’s behalf?

Actually, no. But it’s not the locality that puts me off – I’m probably more ready to support the actual workforce at Bombardier, Derby than the potential workforce at Ashby De La Zouch. And I think we’d all be a lot better off if we got to know a friend of a friend. The thing that turns me off the whole idea of supporting Bombardier is actually the petition itself. The words - composed by some news editor at the Derby Evening Telegraph - are hardly inspiring:

We believe that the Government should change its mind on its decision to select Japanese-led consortium Agility ahead of Derby train-maker Bombardier as the preferred bidder for a £7.5bn contract to build new Intercity trains.

Such a polite request, expressed in New Labour management-speak, directed at our man in Number Ten! Let us sincerely hope he reads it and has a Pauline conversion about the DoT officials’ preferred bidder. Or rather let us not waste our valuable time in trying to engender such abject parochialism initiated by that champion of abject parochialism the local paper. If instead we want to forge new ties with fellow workers in our home town then why not do it direct? Why not visit them at their workplace and get to know them personally instead of mediating the whole relationship with a brief missive on abject parochialism directed to Gordon Brown?

I work for a local authority where job cuts have been announced. This potentially gives me something in common with the Bombardier workers whose managers doubtless now have their excuse at the ready when at some future point in time they announce reductions. A real bread-and-butter issue like this could foster stronger ties which would not necessarily stop at the city boundary – they could reach into Ashby De La Zouch, AND Sheffield AND Gateshead. It is a little early to be saying workers of the world unite, but surely any burgeoning internationalist spirit we have could stretch this far?