Buy British! ...or not??

[Willard Whyte]

Scotland's next First Minister might not care who builds aircraft for the Viet Jock Air Force, if they are not built at Prestwick they might as well be built St. Louis.

Well, they might be able to afford some very second hand Mirage IIIs.

Given the political leanings of comrade Salmond perhaps Venzuela might give him some.

[airpolice]

Willard, like many others, you suggest that Wee Eck's may be the next arse on the big seat.

I'm thinking that it might go another way.......... A huge Yes vote followed by a Labour win at the elections.

If you think the SNP will enjoy telling Westminster to **** off, imagine what the old school lefty jocks will do!

[tucumseh]

And again, here we have the classic UK model - produce a world-beating but highly specialized item that meets a specific and narrow UK need - but which few other nations find buyable.

As opposed to the US, who have on occasion done all of the above, but with the added bonus of having snake oil salesmen who sold obsolescent and obsolete crap to the UK.

Examples. Apache avionics. BOWMAN radios. At least on Apache we changed our minds before delivery (much to the chagrin of the MoD Apache project team and US).

But the real howler was; we bought better, more modern radios to replace Clansman; then upgraded and bought a system that actually met the requirements (e.g. LPI); both much to the chagrin of the BOWMAN project team. (But kudos to the BOWMAN OR officer who had the balls to start a URD "As BOWMAN won't be good enough"). Then we let the BOWMAN contract anyway and bought the obsolescent kit. That's one thing we are world beaters at. Shooting ourselves in the foot. But hey, it generated minimum wage jobs in Reading and Basingstoke. But we could have done that and bought kit we actually needed (and worked).