Honda: Thousands march to keep Swindon factory open

Thousands march through Swindon to kick start a campaign to stop Honda’s plans to shut down their Swindon factory in 2021 – which, adding in the supply chain and associated businesses, will mean 15,000 jobs going and the devastation of the local economy.
Honda say they are leaving to produce electric cars in larger markets such as America or Asia, spurred on by favourable EU deals and uncertainty over Brexit. Of course we need to move to electric cars to combat climate change – but Honda will be increasing carbon emissions by producing cars far away, then putting them on boats to sell them in Europe. So the madness of the market is neither solving climate change nor protecting workers’ jobs.
We need to produce electric vehicles locally, as well as the batteries and the infrastructure – which means not only keeping Honda open, but actually increasing the jobs in the supply chain. And it’s high time we started planning the work we need to do to cut UK carbon emissions by 80% – which means creating a million extra jobs immediately, not throwing highly skilled workforces on the dole. Please support the Honda workers in this crucially important dispute.