Mrs. M. Thatcher, The Prime Minister, 10 Downing Street, LONDON W1.
Dear Mrs. Thatcher,
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2 8 APR 1986
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Bruary 1986.
PA
REGISTRY Action Taken
I am glad you received my earlier letter regarding Westland and the Department of Industry and Commerce replied restating your view that Westland shareholders should decide for themselves, which they have now done, and I thoroughly commend you for your action which has cost you so much.
I now have another suggestion which I hope will be considered. I am a retired aircraft salesman and during my time working for the British aircraft industry I sold many hundreds of millions of Pounds worth of British aircraft all over the world. I am very aware that previous Governments, both Conservative and Labour, for one reason or another, made life impossible for the aircraft industry of Britain to survive in any really successful way. Admittedly this was often through lack of money available but some very silly technical decisions were made by Duncan Sands and even worse the Socialists subjected the industry to two years indecision over the nationalisation plans they had which I am sure you will agree were entirely political and of course achieved absolutely nothing for workers in the industry.
In 1945 the aircraft industry in Britain was possibly more advanced than that in the JU.S. and despite a number of mistakes and failures Britain could have developed a
leading roll in world aviation and provided Britain with the best kind of export where raw materials cost almost nothing and 90% of the value of the product comes from man-hours which mean that building aircraft can be the best possible form of export available to any country.
The story of Sir George Edwards and Lord Portal's struggle with successive Governments may be known to you but if not and you have the time and inclination, Charles Gardeners book which details everything that happened during the 17 years of life of the British Aircraft Corporation, should be obligatory reading for every Member of Parliament.
In almost retirement and using only telephone and telex it looks as though I may have managed to sell £80,000,000 worth of aircraft, partly British built to the Communist Chinese, without any of the problems mentioned by the Chairman of G.E.C. experienced he says over two years of negotiations with China. Britains terrific advantage over the years in having Hong Kong and two million Chinese who are often more British than we are, has only helped very little with British exports to China. I have seen that we only provide 2% of exports to China coming through Europe. This is a terrible reflection on British born people working in Hong Kong for such enterprises as the Hong Kong Shanghai Bank, Jardine Matheson and Swire.
I was responsible for the sale of eight Viscounts to the early Chinese Government and there is some significance I think in that the engineers and pilots that were sent to England for training had to receive their instruction through an interpretor and their subsequent examinations had also to be translated back into English by this translator. Nevertheless, this class got the best marks ever achieved in their school from among nearly 70 airlines coming from all parts of the world including America.
My feeling is that over the years such native ability will make China even more
Continued/...
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