Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-07-04-Speech-2-201"
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"en.20060704.28.2-201"2
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"Mr President, it is no coincidence that my colleague, Mr Bushill-Matthews, and myself have asked to speak in this debate. We come from the West Midlands region of the United Kingdom, a region that has historically been very dependent on the car industry, which has been through many cycles of plant closures and change.
The other day I went to speak at a school in Coventry and I said to the children: ‘You know where that Blockbuster video store and that supermarket are? In the 1980s I worked in a car factory there that employed 20 000 people’.
There is nothing new about this. We are treating it as if it were new. Investment will create jobs and deliver the solution to the problems that many colleagues on this side have talked about: investment in new cars, investment in new factories, investment in robots that will cut the cost of production, and investment in quality. I ask Mr Schulz where that investment is going to come from. It is going to come from profits. What the car industry is short of is not bleeding hearts; it needs more profits to invest in those new products. That is going on in the successful companies.
Another factory I worked in during my 30 years in the industry – the Oxford plant of what was the British Motor Corporation – is now one of the most successful car plants in England, which produces the Mini. You see them all over the place, you see them in America. BMW – the owners of that plant, a German company – is investing GBP 250 million to make a new car there and we thank BMW for that. It is going to create another thousand jobs. An engine that was made in Brazil is now going to be made in Birmingham, in my constituency.
I say to my friends in Portugal – and many of them will be speaking shortly about these issues: come and talk to those of us who have lived through that problem before. One of the saddest days of my life was when I went to the Longbridge car plant to meet the receiver of that plant, which had gone bankrupt. I started work there in 1967 when it employed 25 000 people, and now I walked into an empty factory.
That is the reality of industrial life. It has been there for a long time. The issue is how we deal with it. We need better employment, we need full employment, we need retraining, and we need to help people who are made redundant to get new employment. If something cannot be saved, we have the responses to it. We have been involved at Longbridge, where 5000 people were made redundant. We are working at Peugeot at the moment and in other areas. Come and talk to us about the practical things that we are doing and stop complaining in this Chamber about the problems. We have all been through them every day. Let us not have another debate like this. Let us think about a positive way forward."@en1
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