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Crossing the Bar from The Politicians
I was made Minister of Technology in the summer of 1966. I had a historic interest in the shipbuilding industry because my mother was a Paisley woman, and I lived in Clydebank for a while as a child. From the election defeat of 1970 to 1974, I was shadow spokesman for industry, and in 1974 I was made Secretary of State for Industry, before being sacked by the PM Harold Wilson in 1975. I then had ministerial responsibility as Secretary for Energy from 1975 to 1979, which gave me some sort of involvement as in shipbuilding as the Marathon yard at Clydebank built oil rigs.
In the summer of 1966, Harold Wilson called me and said that I would be in charge of a very big department. One of my first jobs was to implement the Geddes Report. We had the SIB, whose job was to try and deal with the decline of the industry by setting up viable estuarial units. My first task as a new minister was to get these going. I got into a lot of trouble with George Brown [Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, First Secretary of State and Minister of Economic Affairs at Department of Economic Affairs, and Foreign Secretary later in 1966] who had set up the Fairfield Experiment, because he thought that UCS would undermine Fairfield.
Any Minister will be told, in effect, to rely upon the Civil Servants, who actually do not know much about it. They are all generalists who move about perhaps doing shipbuilding one week and the aircraft industry the next. The Civil Service provides the briefings. Then, at the Ministry of Technology, I had an Advisory Committee on Technology, which included scientists and industrialists. I also saw the shipbuilders and the unions. I always made it a key issue to keep in touch with the shipbuilding unions, of which there were a large number. One of the problems of the shipbuilding industry as compared to mining was that there was a mass of unions. Inter union rivalry was quite difficult and was used as an excuse by those who were hostile to the industry. I had a fair range of advice open to me, and I always tried to keep sources of advice that were not official.
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