It is now a commonplace scene, but back in 1901 the sight of , the Royal Navy’s first submarine, must have baffled the people of Barrow as she slipped out of yacht shed one and into the channel.
The 115th anniversary of the launch passed on Sunday, a timely reminder of the long and proud history of submarine building in our town and the part we have played this country’s defence down the years.
But submarines are not just part of the history of Barrow, they are also our central to our future.
It is a fitting quirk of fate that the anniversary of the first submarine built in Barrow came in the same week that we mark the first stage in the construction of the next generation of boats that will safeguard our nation for decades to come.
It was an honour to be at the yard yesterday to see the first steel cut for the new Successor boats that will replace the ageing Vanguard class and carry the Trident nuclear deterrent.
The ritual of cutting the steel, an age-old ceremony to mark the start of a build, coveys a powerful sense of the scale of the job ahead of us and the weight of history that comes with such a moment. The blaze of the plasma in the plate shop a visible sign of the bright future this work will bring Barrow and the surrounding area.
The steel-cutting ceremony comes hard on the heels of the news that another £1.3bn has been released by the Ministry of Defence to allow BAE to complete the initial manufacturing phase of the project.
This latest wave of investment is welcome and is a real vote of confidence in the facilities and workforce in the yard who have worked relentlessly to be ready for this moment. Successor will be the most complicated engineering project ever undertaken in the UK, we should all be incredibly proud of our town and the workforce at the yard that we have been entrusted with this task.
There was another boost to the Successor project last week at the Labour Party conference as the shadow defence secretary Clive Lewis confirmed that there would be no attempt to reverse Labour’s long-standing commitment to our nuclear deterrent.
With the vote passed in parliament, the construction now under way and the project well past the point of no return, I am glad we can finally put this debate to bed and move on. I for one am reassured that the future of our nuclear deterrent is now out of parliament and in the hands of Barrow's finest engineers, naval architects, welders and the like.
Our nuclear deterrent keeps us safe here in the UK, but for millions of civilians in Syria there is no respite from war and devastation. I have been in Istanbul this week meeting the leaders of the opposition coalition who have been fighting against the brutal dictator Bashar Hafez al-Assad, his Russian allies and of course the Islamist terrorists ISIL. They stressed to me that we simply cannot afford to wait for a new US president in a few months, or for the Russians to have a change of heart. In a few months’ time, thousands more civilians will have died, hospitals will have been bombed, and refugees will have fled. I will return to parliament determined that the UK and our allies in the United Nations do more to break the deadlock and do everything possible to protect those desperate people still suffering in Syria.
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