10 October 2006

Peugoet Changes Its Mind about Ryton

Peugeot has announced that it will now close the plant at Ryton six months early. Unions have strongly criticised the decision and say they will maintain a campaign urging customers to boycott Peugeot and Citroen vehicles.

Dave Osborne, T&G national secretary: "Peugeot built hopes up that there would be work well into next year if people wanted it ... But they have dashed those hopes and, worse, denied our members the chance to look for work in the knowledge there was a reasonable income coming in."

I suppose a "traditional" Green position would be to celebrate the loss of car production, but the real problem is that the shutting down of Ryton means the loss of high-wage unionised work. We need to keep that type of manufacturing base in the city.

Considering that the largest windfarm in Europe is being developed outside of Glasgow (140 turbines to power 200 000 homes), we could retain the engineering/production knowledge at Ryton by pushing for a smaller windfarm here in Coventry/Warwickshire, say, 50 turbines to power 25% of the homes in Coventry (75 000 households), instead of this incessent lobbying by the city council for a supercasino.

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