What If The Worse Case Scenario Regarding Bridgend Ford Happens?

Hello there. Hope you're feeling well today.

Let me explain how significant the news with regard to Bridgend Ford was. That a leaked report suggested that by 2021 there would be a cut of 1160 jobs in the Ford plant just outside of the town leaving just six hundred workers there.

I was returning from Penarth, for reasons that I'll explain in my next post but are unimportant here and had just turned the radio on. The item about Bridgend Ford was on the news.....and it was the first time ever that I've heard Bridgend being a news item on BBC Radio 3 (which if you're reading this outside the UK is a mainly classical music radio station).

The statement by Ford in response was just a masterpiece of waffle. Coming second was the response of the Prime Minister with First Minister Carwyn Jones third when he described the report as a "worse case scenario".

It's his response I want to focus on here as it's not the sort of answer that the workers of Bridgend expect from the most important elected official in the nation (or indeed the Assembly member for that region). After all would you like to be told by your doctor that you have a brain tumour and that the worse case scenario was death? No. You would expect them to be at your head before you could say antibiotic as they made every effort to resolve the situation.

What we have now is a situation where people working at Ford feel that there is a clock ticking with regard to their jobs in this major employer. But what a lot of them might not know is whether that clock applies to them. The worst of all possible worlds.

And of course there would be a knock on effect for many companies/people in the area both large and small would be equally devastating . People with less money to spend will cut back on buying goods/services. Ford is a big employer. I'll predict one thing now. Should the worse case scenario happen everyone in the Bridgend area will be effected.

Let me give a few examples. When the age of austerity began in 2008, two types of people began to notice it's effects immediately. The first were cobblers as man had the heels of their shoes redone rather than buy new ones. The other were nursery school assistants. My wife told me at the time that when she was chatting to someone who worked at are local nursery after my daughter had left there that person mentioned that she had to cut back on the number of assistants she employed because unemployed parents who couldn't afford the fees (and they are expensive) took their children out of the nursery to look after them at home.

(And from experience I'll tell you now that had my daughter been of that age when I was unemployed one of those parents would've been me)

In this blog (see labels) I have regularly detailed the decline of Bridgend Town mainly due I would argue to Labour party incompetence either at council or Senedd level. I've mentioned before that I'm going to do an update next week. But let me predict something else now. If the worse case scenario regarding Ford happens then a town in decline will be tipped into disaster.

So you might think if Labour cannot help what about the Tories or UKIP? Well do you think that Ford are going to look favourably on a plant in or out of the EU if it involves shipping cars into the European Union? What the good people of Bridgend who voted Leave was not told it appears is that in voting to "take back control" it has in fact moved to Detroit.

Which leaves Plaid Cymru. They may succeed they may fail but they would start from the clean slate of being untainted by Labour party incompetence or the red white and blue hard Brexit of the scoundrel that appears to be the Tory/UKIP position. And they would care. If I wasn't moving out of the area I'd put my name down as a candidate in the forthcoming local elections. Even though I'd have to put up with the first comment "you're English!".

Skilled people unemployed, a declining town possibly tipped over the edge, knock on effects that will damage the area for possibly a generation. The first minster should not wait for the possibility of the worse case scenario. He needs to act now.

Until the next time.