Even if a successful Indendance vote occured during the build phase it would be pretty much irrelevant to the CVFs.
There would be a divorce period during which the mechanism of power are separated and new ones are grown.
Work would likely be completed or beyond the point of moving it elsewhere … at huge expense and time-line delay.
And besides why shouldn’t shipyards in an Independant Scotland not build Ships for other countries?
If you think that England would place a single order beyond CVF (yes that would probably not be shifted) in Scotland if Scotland is independent then you are living in cloud cuckoo land. Or can you point out to me when the last British destroyer/frigate was built in Italy or Ireland? Portsmouth and Barrow-in-Furness would be celebrating if Scotland becomes independent, it would mean the ca. 8000 Scottish warship building jobs (all in all, BVT, Rosyth, etc…) would be created in Portsmouth and lost in Scotland. Afterall the Royal Navy would still have ca. 90% of its funding but Scotland at the moment gets far more than 10% (HMNB Clyde, CVF, etc…) of that. Note how Ireland does not have a huge warship building capacity but often buys British, in a decade the same would happen with Scotland because you do not sustain skills by ordering three OPVs a decade.
Also noteworthy, Babcock (HQ London, new CEO Mike Turner) and BVT (HQ Portsmouth, CEO Alan Johnston) are English registered companies with English CEOs, they would not blink once if the then English&Welsh MoD tells them to protect English jobs and close the Scottish yards. And believe me the former VT Group Portsmouth yard is more than capable of doing the whole FSC programme. They after all repeatedly win export business and currently are the only yard to hold large export contracts (Oman, Trinidad & Tobago). Business does not have the “everything will be rosy” attitude of the seperatists. Business actually works within a concept called “reality”.
I think there is a reason why the shipbuilding unions are fiercly unionist. But don’t get me wrong, as long as Scotland is part of the union I will cheer everysingle Scottish job CVF sustains or creates (and not only because I have Scottish relatives) and I think it is brilliant how all parts of the UK are working together on this, it shows that we are stronger together than apart, and that’s what the union is about, better lifes for everyone.
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