BAE Shipbuilding Fiasco Has Lessons
Source: defense-aerospace.com; published Nov. 7, 2013 By Giovanni de Briganti
BAE TO SHUTTER LAST UK SHIPYARD
A vastly different and nuanced take on the ‘closure’ from Sir Humphrey:

The death of UK shipbuilding has been greatly over exaggerated
The news in the UK is dominated today by the announcements of mass redundancies in the BAE shipbuilding business, with almost 2000 jobs being lost at three sites in Portsmouth and Scotland. The news is very sad, particularly for those families involved, but offset slightly by the news of a planned order of three new OPVs for the Royal Navy, ostensibly to replace the current River class vessels. The news has been seen as highly damaging to the UK shipbuilding industry, and resulted in headlines claiming the end of 500 years shipbuilding as we know it in Portsmouth (in fact utter nonsense as Portsmouth has gone many decades without building warships other than HMS CLYDE – it had only recently regained construction of blocks for the Type 45 project) and leading to unpleasant suggestions about it being a sop to the Scots ahead of the referendum.