HALF of the former British Leyland Cowley car complex is to be demolished next year. A site that once employed up to 10,000 unionised staff will be turned into a 'business park of small units, a hotel and a giant Tescos, employing a handful of low-paid, mainly part-time staff.
In the 1960s under left-wing leadership the Cowley Assembly Plant unions were nationally known pace-setters in the fight for pay and conditions.
Now, under the thumb of hardline right wingers, the TGWU has opposed any fight to defend the plant or the jobs being axed.
The story is depressingly familiar. Ten miles down the road the former MG car plant in Abingdon now houses part of the buropean grain mountain. In Cowley itself, the old Grove Cranes plant is now a B&Q.
The same is true all over the country. Productive industry has closed down to make way for a low-paid casualised service sector that is largely responsible for the fact that 46% of British Thatcherism has seen mining communities devastated, steel towns gutted, docks and shipyards flattened and the engineering heartlands demolished to make way for carpet warehouses, DIY stores and shopping malls.
The latest slump shows yet again that the economy cannot survive on the service sector alone, and that once manufacturing jobs - and the pay and conditions won by workers - have been surrendered they will not return.
In place of John Major's rickety chipboard furniture economy, workers need a socialist plan of production. The industries that capitalism is so ready to dismantle for short-term gain, and the banks and service sector, should be nationalised, under workers' control and without compensation to prevent the whole country turning into a giant burger bar.
A start along this alternative road would be the ousting of the Tories coupled with a redoubled fight for socialist policies in the labour movement.
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