Irony lost on Rosyth in fight for Trident

THE ironies seem less neat and less obvious when the sea winds are

blowing in from the Firth of Forth and the sky has lowered like a

curtain. Scotland's biggest single industrial site is fighting for its

life and for the right to service a weapon few Scots want to see in the

world, never mind on their own doorsteps.

It is fighting, too, for a weapon that could yet be phased out as the

''new world order'' struggles to emerge from chaos and defence budgets

are cut. Meanwhile, its workers are fighting, to the economic death,

against their fellows at Devonport, near Plymouth.

Trident is an ugly brute, a technological beast whose unleashing would

signal ultimate failure, not triumph. Its reason for being is defined in

negatives, in terms of what must never happen. Yet it is a sword that

cannot be beaten into a ploughshare. At Rosyth 4200 workers depend on

the right to service it, as do 14,000 in associated enterprises, as do

5000 at Devonport.

More ironies? At Rosyth this spawn of the war economy is nurtured by

Labour local authorities and a Labour Shadow Chancellor, Gordon Brown,

MP for Dunfermline East. At Devonport the workers have the backing of

Labour-controlled Plymouth City Council and a Tory regional authority.

Yet Malcolm Rifkind, the Conservative Minister of Defence who must

behave as Solomon in his judgment, is an Edinburgh MP and a former

Scottish Secretary who understands what the loss of the dockyard could

mean for his party in Scotland. Rifkind has said that both yards will

remain open -- but he has yet to decide on the crucial Trident work.

If used, the weapon would be no respecter of party lines.

The politics surrounding it are equally undiscriminating. Labour

reneged on its commitment to unilateral disarmament just in time to

allow Gordon Brown to fight Rosyth's fight with a clear conscience.

Rifkind, meanwhile, knows only too well that the flutterings of recovery

in Tory fortunes in Scotland might be stilled if his decision went

against Rosyth.

Yet with only 11 Scottish MPs to worry about -- and none in Fife --

the Government might be expected to favour Devonport.

Certainly rumours of a Cabinet split fuelled by fears of a Liberal

Democrat resurgence in the South-west of England can be explained in

purely political terms. Several Tory seats are marginals, and the Lib

Dems took 30% of the vote in the region last April.

The English workers see it otherwise. They have all but accused the

Scottish Office of playing pork barrel politics and of unleashing the

Scottish lobby of whingers and special pleaders against a susceptible

Scottish Minister of Defence.

Rosyth counters that Devonport has friends within the Ministry of

Defence, that it has been aided, often covertly, at every turn. Why, in

any case, should the death of Rosyth maim Scottish Conservatism? The

closure of Ravenscraig was supposed to do that, wasn't it?

Meanwhile the Scottish National Party, the only Scottish party to have

opposed Trident, is muted. It is in an ethical and political bind and

can only talk of the yard's retention as a refit centre for a future

Scottish navy. The size of the proposed armada has yet to be specified.

Devonport prices its bid at #130m; Rosyth's would cost #147m. Both

have been scaled down during the race to win the lion's share of Royal

Navy refit work worth #400m a year. Sixty per cent of Rosyth's

activities are related to MoD contracts. A ''compromise'' giving it a

ten-year guarantee of surface vessel refit work is not enough.

This, then, is the peace dividend: thousands of jobs may be destroyed,

communities ravaged, skills lost forever, another chapter in Britain's

maritime tradition closed, 40 years of addiction to the war economy

brought to a brutal surcease.

Britain, like most Western countries, has been reducing its defence

effort in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. But the

transition, bedevilled by international instability and the special

responsibilities this tiny nation incurs in exchange for a seat on the

UN Security Council, has been less ill-managed than un-managed.

Few attempts have been made to retrain workers or to retool

industries. In any case, defence firms searching for suitable

alternatives tend to find most niches already occupied.

Meanwhile, a Commons committee warns the Government that cuts in the

armed forces have gone too far; that Britain may no longer be able to

meet its international commitments -- whatever those commitments might

be.

Hence Rifkind's decision to shelve the merger of four regiments. The

Army will retain 5000 more troops than it would otherwise have for

Ireland, Bosnia or, should the need arise, any other trouble spot.

Someone, in Rosyth or elsewhere, will have to pay for that.

There are 25 ''separate and substantial'' conflicts going on in the

world, according to Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd. Yet he is part of a

Government whose Prime Minister, having called for a reduction in the

world's arms trade after the Gulf war, recently secured a #5000m deal to

sell 48 Tornado fighters to Saudi Arabia before selling 36 Challenger II

tanks to Oman.

Mr Major has political logic on his side: the Saudi deal means

security for 19,000 British Aerospace workers; the tank order will help

Vickers in a similar fashion. Yet it was Major who proposed, in the

aftermath of the Gulf, that a UN register of arms exports and imports be

created as a means of curbing the arms bazaar. The register opened on

January 1, and states are invited to disclose import and export figures

to the UN by April 1. But there is no compulsion on them to do so.

Major was equally instrumental in setting up the so-called P5 group,

comprising the five permanent members of the UN Security Council who

account between them for 80% of the world's conventional arms sales. Yet

the group met only three times before America and France competed to

sell fighter aircraft to Taiwan. The US offloaded F14s; France its

Mirages. And the outraged Chinese boycotted P5 before stepping up its

arms sales to the Middle East and former Yugoslavia

All this must seem a long way from the Fife coast, but Rosyth, like

much of British industry, is embedded in a process which has seen

defence spending become interlocked with national economies since the

Second World War. The peace dividend has yet to be paid. Instead,

recession-hit governments are using defence cuts to reduce their budget

deficits.

Global spending on arms was edging towards $1000 billion a year in

1987. It has since fallen to $885 billion. Economists and anti-war

groups have claimed that a real peace dividend could be worth anything

from $80 billion to $100 billion a year (three-quarters of it accounted

for by the northern hemisphere). But plans for increased humanitarian

aid and for environmental projects have already been for-gotten.

Such savings as there have been have gone, in the West, to finance

unemployment, as Rosyth may yet discover. Germany, for example, plans to

cut its armed forces to fewer than the 370,000 agreed by the US and the

USSR at the time of reunification. The 420,000 of the Bundeswehr is

expected to be cut to 300,000 by 1995 as Germany's recession bites.

In the US, similarly, Bill Clinton will dip into his defence budget to

try to control the federal deficit. The derided Star Wars programme will

be cut (but not abandoned). But the fall of the Soviet empire was a

historic opportunity for the West to reshape its economy. Amid the

hurried proposals debated, revised, dropped or improvised, that is being

forgotten.

The biggest irony of all is that there is money available to revive

both Fife and the South-west of England. The Government, with Labour's

agreement, prefers to spend it on a missile system called Trident.