“The whole industry, not just the UK Chamber, has a responsibility to promote itself and argue its case,” said Kenneth MacLeod, who is also Stena Line chairman. “We must be vocal about employment, the economy, the state of the nation. Because we are not just a part of it, we are the heart of it.’
“Almost every time I switch on the news I see the manufacturers, the builders, the farmers and the bankers acting as the voice of industry whilst shipping companies remain silent,” he had earlier lamented. “It’s no longer good enough to let other sectors hog the spotlight... A higher media profile will not come to us. We are not owed it. We have to go out and win it. And we can only do that by having the courage of our convictions.”
Such a call to arms comes from a resurgent UK shipping industry. Buoyed by a new “strategic partnership” with national government that was announced during the inaugural London International Shipping Week last September, MacLeod said the shipping summit held with the Prime Minister in Downing Street “showed how seriously Government is taking our industry… (and) how seriously we take our role in the British economy,” a sentiment echoed in the following speech by UK Shipping minister Stephen Hammond.
The almost obligatory snipe at the “interfering” EU was predicated on the looming election for new members of the European Parliament, and the fact a new college of European Commissioners is to take office. Noting that on shipping regulations such as their sulphur restrictions the EU “all too often get it wrong,” the EU was asked to “sometimes accept that the best thing they can do is nothing at all.”
As regards the white paper published last year by the Scottish Government on possible independence, MacLeod pointed out that this contained certain anomalies in that in the event of independence the Northern Lighthouse Board, and the work of the Marine Accident Branch and Marine Coastguard Agency in Scotland, would continue to be funded by UK taxpayers, which he said constituted no independence at all. He called for work “to explain what independence looks like for the shipping sector.”
MacLeod stopped short of expressing any view on how the Scottish people should vote - but his patriotic wearing of a kilt might have offered some pointers. Indeed, in his introduction he noted how after his predecessor Helen Deeble of P&O had become the first lady to occupy the position, someone had quipped that this made it two annual dinners in a row that “the UK Chamber president was wearing a skirt!”
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