Weep not for Britain’s stake in Airbus, but watch what happens to BAE

Let’s not come over all emotional about the sale of BAE Systems’s one fifth stake in Airbus to EADS, the Franco–German group that already owns the rest of it. For a start, the sale does not portend the death of a once-great industry, because Britain has not had much to be proud of in civil aircraft manufacture since before the second world war. The last all-British commercial aircraft any of us flew in was probably a modest BAe 125, but the division of the then British Aerospace that made it was sold to Raytheon of the US in 1993, and its successors are built in Wichita, Kansas. If you are luckier than me, you may have flown with the glitterati in the Anglo–French Concorde, a thing of beauty but a financial disaster and a commercial albatross; and if you are older than me, you might have experienced the luxuries of the de Havilland Comet — but not, I hope, one of the early-1950s models that suffered catastrophic metal fatigue. By the time the designers sorted that problem out, the Comet had been wiped off the competitive map by the Boeing 707 and the Douglas DC-8, to survive only in military form as the Nimrod bomber.

The fact that Airbus still employs 13,000 people making wings in two British factories is, in effect, the result of a long history of state interventions without which this industry would have withered. And even without a significant British shareholder to influence Airbus’s management decisions, the wing-makers’ skilled jobs at Filton and Broughton are a lot more secure than most other factory jobs in Britain, because they were ‘safeguarded’ for the lifetime of the current hot-selling Airbus model range in the intergovernment horse-trading that preceded Airbus’s transition into a single corporate entity in 2001.