Nope, not you who's cynical. TSR2 was an American, criminal intervention (remember them, our “friends” as Obama likes to state) in our industry and led to a massive brain drain, mostly to the US and Canada. In Canada it happened again with the AVRO Arrow. Again that advanced project was abrublty cancelled for no good reason and led to the collapse of AVRO there and virtually destroyed their advanced aerospace industry. Much of the US civil aviation industry was populated with Brits after that, even now although the B737, a fifty year old design now was largely developed into a viable aircraft by the Germans at Lufty.


The Phantom F4 was another example of this. I read the late, great Eric Brown's biography recently. Probably the greatest ever test pilot Captain Brown was instrumental in the testing and selection of the F4 for the navy and pronounced it a great aircraft, an almost unique view even in America!

The long term upshot of all this can be seen in the JSF F35 for the two new carriers; Lockheed's programme is $200 billion over budget and it's still not performing to specs but the US has a monopoly now so what can we do? Just to reiterate, that's $200,000,000,000 over budget...and no aircraft are now made in the UK. None.


I can see parallels in the commercial world with Russia's excellent, new MS-21 and China's A-320 knock-off the C-919. Both will struggle to sell globally but not because of any technical deficiencies. It's all politics.


Getting back to the issue at hand, in a free trading nation such issues may not arise, we could import from whomever, tariff free and to whomever on whatever terms they wish to damage themselves upon.


You can only fight one battle at a time. Vote Leave.

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