Remember this story back in May? William Hague was visiting L-3 in Crawley with Henry Smith MP and Howard Bloom, leader of Crawley council.
At the time Henry said that L-3 was “a great success story for Crawley industry and a great success story in terms of employment and exports as well”. What was not reported at that time, no doubt because the Tory editor of the paper didn’t want to embarrass his Tory friends, was that the company employing about 300 people in the town had just announced that it was making about 100 of them redundant, so not such a great success story for employment after all.
The process of consultation, selecting candidates for redundancy and working out notice periods takes some time and today was the last day at work for many of those 100. Of course, Howard Bloom lost his job as leader of Crawley council a bit sooner than that, despite the best efforts of the media to hide bad news, and only continues as a councillor because he made the chicken run to a safer seat.
With any luck the curse of L-3 will strike again in seven months and Henry Smith will lose his job as an MP and William Hague will lose his job as a government minister.
Interesting twitter. I link to this and tag Henry Smith. He replies, saying that the job losses are not in the UK (and something about Hague standing down in May).
And then Our Gracious Host points out that the jobs are indeed in the UK, as he knows people in Crawley who have been made redundant from L-3
I am sure that the local press will report the MP denying that local people have lost jobs when they have.
To be fair on one point: I wasn’t actually aware that Hague was not intending to stand again, because I don’t really follow the Westminster and conference circus all that closely.
But on the other hand, not being an MP doesn’t actually stop you from being in the cabinet does it? In the unfortunate event of the Tories winning he could still be made Lord Hague of Baseballcap-on-Sea and be appointed to the cabinet.
And on the other other hand, my ignorance of the identities and intentions of Tory ministers isn’t really the main point, which was that the company were making redundancies in Crawley at the same time as they were being praised as good for employment here.
A more cynical person than me might also note that the visit was scheduled for a Friday afternoon at a site that only works half days on Fridays, so there was a bare minumum of disgruntled employees around.