Martin Barker

The Concorde Fiasco

From International Socialism, No.70, Mid-June 1974, p.29.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.

The Concorde Fiasco
Andrew Wilson
Penguin, 45p.

THIS BOOK counterdrives the screws in the coffin of the arguments for Concorde. If any reader still needs convincing that Concorde was a vast waste of money, the facts, are here. Total development costs – more than £1,100 million. Operating costs – more than 2½ times as much as modern subsonic jets. Fuel consumption – if a fleet of 400 operated world-wide they would account for 11 per cent of the world’s total consumption of crude oil.

Add to this the sonic boom, which over sparsely populated Cornwall produced compensation of £4 per mile on test runs; add its dubious impact on the stratosphere; add 101 other facts, and you have the answer: Concorde is just about the largest single waste of men and resources that capitalism has yet discovered.

Yet the fact remains that Concorde is still not cancelled. Now it is certainly not the case that the plane was kept on out of sympathy for the 25,000 workers who directly work on it in Britain. So why has it survived so long? Even in terms of capitalist economics, it is a glaring nonsense.

It is this question that finds no answer in Andrew Wilson’s book. Not, that is, unless you read between the lines, and ignore his own tendency to put down anything unfortunate to mistakes and hasty unplanned thinking.

Far from anything about Concorde being unplanned, the amazing thing about the place is how long it has been on the stocks. Investigations into the possibility of supersonic transport (SST) began in the early 1950s. The project was on the stocks from 1959. And that is normal for the aircraft industry.

Aircraft are produced on the basis of obsolescence. For the whole post-war period, the industry has worked on the assumption of permanently rising demand for air transport, and in particular permanently rising demand for expensive first-class travel. Aircraft developments grew up in a permanent battle of prestige aircraft, in which cheapness, noise restriction, and any environmental consideration were poor relations.

The logic of this was overwhelming. To keep up in the battle for prestige markets, you had to plan your next generation of planes long before the present ones were off the production lines. You had to tie up vast amounts of capital in plans for the future, most of which would come to nothing. That meant, inevitably, that the planes were produced at wildly escalating prices, so they had to be attractive to those who could afford high prices. Which meant designing for the executive market. Which meant ... Concorde.

There is actually no earthly reason why there should be repeated generations of faster, more expensive aircraft coming into service. Indeed the chickens have come home to roost. Most airlines are now working at between 20-50 per cent capacity on most flights because of high prices and competition. The ultimate idiocy has arrived, in that flying businessmen to New York at the fastest speed possible actually incapacitates them for a couple of days – while they recover their time sense.

It is this background of long-term irrational planning that produced Concorde – and its American and Soviet equivalents. So why was the British/French version pushed on with so long, after the Americans had discovered its idiocy from the profit point of view?

I don’t think we need to accept Andrew Wilson’s answer. According to him, the reason lay in the superb American tradition of democratic access to public information. Even he may have changed his mind on that since Watergate.

No, the truth is that, by 1971, when the US plane was cancelled, the USA economy was suffering the worst effects of the Vietnam War and so was scrutinising all major projects under a microscope.

Cancellation was easy to ensure, for the aircraft industry depends heavily on government funds and the US government simply did not make these available.

Not so Britain. On the contrary, the licence with which government money was made available in the early years led to at least two major scandals. In 1963 Ferranti was found to have made £5½ million excess profit on the Bloodhound missile. Then in 1964 Bristol Siddeley Engines were caught overcharging with up to 300 per cent profit on repair contracts.

The reliance on government money was complete. Although by 1968 direct contract work for the government was only 30 per cent of BAC’s work, the Sunday Times could remark:

‘Its indirect reliance is total. It is so simple for the government to make or break a project through simple lack of assistance with risk capital.’

So it was primarily a government decision to keep Concorde going. And the obvious reason was the Common Market. In 1961 De Gaulle had explicitly made the production of Concorde a condition for Britain having any chance of joining the Six. For French capitalism, international co-operation was the only hope for the French aircraft industry being able to resist American competition.

Concorde remained a pawn in the fight for a European capitalist link-up. Now that we’re in, and the economic cost has overtaken the political gain, it will probably go. The cost for the working class will almost certainly be 25,000 jobs. This is something Wilson, the tut-tutting Observer air correspondent, has nothing to say about. In one sentence he speaks of the possibility of a government resettling these 25,000. Like hell!

For socialists this is the problem. Concorde has not only been a pawn in the Common Market entry game, it has also been – and still is – an ideological noose on the BAC and Rolls-Royce workers who produce it. It is a physical noose in the form of the Concorde ties which many BAC workers wear to work. Every redundancy so far has been sold as necessary to the salvation of Concorde. When the latest cancellation scare came, the BAC general manager called in the shop stewards, who immediately issued a statement denying any intention ever to use militancy to save jobs.

Even the more militant Rolls-Royce stewards’ body insists on linking jobs and Concorde. But then the problem is, what happens if Concorde is cancelled? You can’t use militancy to prevent cancellation of such a project. You can’t appeal to the rest of the trade union movement to defend Concorde. And in the meantime, most important, you have convinced the rest of the shop floor in Bristol that their only hope lies in Concorde. The result will be total demoralisation.

Socialists have a vast job to do at Rolls-Royce and BAC, to break the hold of Concorde chauvinism. Or the whole trade union movement in Bristol will sustain a blow from which it will take years to recover. And those socialists – which means at the moment only the International Socialists since no one else shows the least sign of doing it – are going to be sailing against the stream in their attempts.

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