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Diageo Closures

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for speaking up for Glasgow, which he does regularly in this House. I am sure that the workers are pleased that they are not being forgotten in this debate. I hope that the campaign will continue and that they will have other opportunities to make their case. However, time is always short for these debates so I shall try to make progress with the argument that I want to make for my constituents, and in respect of the wider issues at stake. Since 1 July, much has been written and spoken about this matter, in the Scottish media and more widely. Latterly, corporate whisky has been responding to the campaign to get Diageo to think again about its proposals, and last week Diageo embarked on a counter-campaign. Over the weekend, it was reported in the online edition of The Sunday Times that the view of the managing director of the distiller and bottler Ian McLeod and Co. was that, as a consequence of the decision, the whisky industry had""become the latest plaything of government and opposition."" He is reported to have said:""If the politicians are going to start shouting from the rooftops whenever a company tries to make some of their employees redundant, it hardly sends out a positive message to prospective inward investors in Scotland"." Some of us thought that that attitude had gone out in the 1980s, but unfortunately it seems to be alive and well in corporate whisky. My message to that director is that his rather quaint and old-fashioned views mainly reinforce my concerns about where we will end up if we do not stop and think hard about the full implications of the proposals. Far from playing at it, we are deadly serious. The workforce at both Kilmarnock and Hurlford, the Unite and GMB unions, East Ayrshire council, Scottish Enterprise, the Scottish Government, Willie Coffey, who is the Member of the Scottish Parliament for my constituency, the members of the recently elected Scottish Youth Parliament, as well as wider civic society in Kilmarnock and Loudoun and in Ayrshire, have all joined together to speak with one voice in asking Diageo to think again. That we have sustained this campaign from a standing start for two weeks now, maintaining a consistent public presence and gathering support from across the world, is convincing evidence that the cause is just. However, it is also a sign of the degree of pain that the community is feeling and the level of fear that it has for its future. The Johnnie Walker workers in Kilmarnock are extremely grateful to wider Scottish society for the support that they have received. The First Minister and my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Scotland have both pledged their support. On behalf of my constituents, I should like to thank the hon. Members for Moray (Angus Robertson), for Orkney and Shetland (Mr. Carmichael) and for Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale (David Mundell) for joining me last week to launch an all-party UK parliamentary presence in this campaign. I should also like to add our thanks to my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow, Central (Mr. Sarwar) and the Scottish Affairs Committee for taking up our request that it investigate the implications of the decision for Scotland. If we add to that the growing petition that is attracting support from throughout the world and the offers of support that are flooding in from all over, the House may get a sense of how important the issue is. All that will be reflected in a march and rally in Kilmarnock on 26 July, to which all those Members not on holiday—which we all know is for all but two weeks during the recess—are invited.