Poor Louise Haigh, the transport secretary, has put her foot in it by almost scuppering a £1bn investment by P&O Ferries owner Dubai-based DP World in its London Gateway port in Essex. Haigh had described P&O as ‘a rogue operator’ for sacking 800 staff members in favour of cheaper, agency labour, paid below the minimum wage, back in 2022, and added for good measure that she had ‘been boycotting P&O Ferries for two-and-a-half years and I would encourage consumers to do the same’.
DP World were on the point of pulling out of the government’s Global Investment Summit on Monday, an event intended to attract billions of pounds of foreign investment, and show, according to a Downing Street spokesperson, that ‘Britain is open for business’. But now that Sir Keir has distanced himself from Haigh’s remarks, insisting that they were ‘not the view of the government’, and there has, according to Downing Street, been ‘warm engagement’ between senior figures in the government and DP World, the P&O owners say they have been given ‘the clarity we need’ to go ahead with the investment. Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, DP World chairman, is set to confirm it in the coming days.
The Conservative Press has had a field day, as evidence of Labour’s incompetence mounts by the day. Kemi Badenoch summed up the general feeling in the Telegraph on Saturday when she wrote that Haigh’s ‘lefty rant on TV [almost] lost the country a £1 billion investment’. But although Haigh’s announcement last week of new legislation to protect seafarers might have been better timed, my sympathies on this issue are with the transport secretary.
The first reason is that P&O Ferries should, as Haigh advised, be avoided at all costs, because their service has noticeably deteriorated over recent years, and because they pay some crew as little as £4.87 an hour. This is, indeed, disgraceful. Contrary to what the ideologists of Thatcherite neoliberalism, like Badenoch, would have us believe, most people do not want a low-skill cheap-labour economy, fed by mass immigration, legal and illegal, where workers are on zero-hours contracts working 60-hour weeks to make ends meet, live in caravan parks because they cannot afford rents, and depend on food banks and government handouts; an economy where, instead of training up our own people, we do things on the cheap by attracting ‘the brightest and best’ from around the world, while leaving our own on the scrap heap – as we do, for example, by importing two thirds of our doctors and half of our nurses.
The second is that there are strategic costs associated with selling off our national assets to the highest bidder, of leaving everything to global markets, of prostituting ourselves at global investment summits devoted to bribing foreign investors to invest in us all because we have failed to invest in ourselves. The last government’s handing over of our steel and semiconductor industries to the Chinese, a hostile power, may have brought short-run financial gain, but it dealt a body blow to any pretence we have of maintaining our national sovereignty. And if we cared about our strategic national interest, or even our history and our culture, we would never have allowed the iconic P&O to become foreign owned, as it did in 2006.
Some of us remember 1982 when Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands. Within two days of the declaration of war, the P&O ships Canberra and Elk had been requisitioned, the Canberra’s 1650 passengers unceremoniously disembarked so that it could be transformed into a troop ship complete with two flight decks ready to transport 3000 men of the Royal Marines and Parachute Regiment to the South Atlantic. More requisitions followed, with the passenger ferry Norland being converted into a troop ship and the liner Uganda into a hospital ship. Canberra and Norland formed part of the naval assault group that entered San Carlos Water to disembark British troops to retake the islands. No less than 860 P&O crew volunteered to serve with their ships on the operation. Without these ships, and their loyal crews, the Falklands could not have been retaken.
No-one believes that Labour would lift a finger now to protect the Falklands, or Gibraltar, or any other of our overseas assets. The wretched Chagos Agreement is ample evidence of that. But the tragedy is that even if the will were there, we no longer have the resources, military or civilian, to do so. We were once a proud nation. Now it seems we are little more than a business park cum transit camp at the beck and call of our international paymasters. As the government says, Britain is open for business – and so long as the price is right, any business will do.