The Campaign Against Climate change held a rally in London on Thursday 6 August in support of the 600 Vestas workers whose jobs making wind turbine blades are to be lost as the company moves production to the USA.
The rally outside the Department of Energy and Climate Change in Whitehall on Thursday evening started in light rain, but it was pouring by the time it finished. Despite the weather, the 80 or so present listened intently to speeches from a Vestas worker, trade union speakers from the RMT, PCW and Billy Hayes of the Communications Workers Union, as well as former Labour Secretary of State for the Environment Michael Meacher MP and Green Party GLA member Jenny Jones, who arrived at the event by bicycle.
Despite the government having spent thousands of billions propping up the banks it is unwilling to put up the much smaller amounts needed to support green industries. The problems of Vestas are indeed very much of the Government’s making, with its failure to put it’s money where its mouth is on green energy policies, relying on hot air rather than support for wind power and other alternative energies.
Making wind turbines is a profitable business, and will become even more so, but unless action is taken – such as nationalising Vestas, at least (as with the banks) on a temporary basis, the UK will be buying them from abroad rather than making money selling them to the rest of the world.
This story is also on Demotix, and I’ll put more pictures on My London Diary next week:
http://mylondondiary.co.uk/2009/08/aug.htm