Keir Starmer and Rachael Reeves are not as clever as they think they are.

We might all have our belts tightened ‘til our eyes pop out, as a result. That would seem to be the opinion of the Financial Times.

I am not an avid daily reader of that paper but from time to time I dip into it because an article of interest will have been mentioned in something else I am reading.

I mention this fact almost by way of excuse although I am not sure why one would need an excuse to be caught reading the Financial Times. It is always a good idea to know what the opposition is at.

Anyway, two months ago, I noted that the Financial Times had an article on the appointment of administrators for Harland & Wolff.

Those of us living west of the Bann are, for diverse and fairly mundane reasons, less interested than our neighbours east of the river in the fortunes of Harland and Wolff.

People in Fermanagh, Tyrone, or Derry do not have the same emotional connection to this once large employer as do those whose families wrought in it for three generations or more through waves of redundancies affecting the communities living in the shelter and shadow of its cranes, while the company benefitted from taxpayer investment time and again. Maybe it is all over now.

But maybe, not!

You might recall that one of the first actions of the new Labour government was to refuse to guarantee £ 200 million of potential debt on a larger loan H&W were negotiating with what the Financial Times described as a ‘high-interest loan company’ in the USA.

This is what started the latest ‘closure of H&W’ saga in the midst of the hue and cry of a ‘full order book.’

The order book was indeed full. H&W were partners in a successful bid to build not one but three FSS ships - for the UK government.

The lead company is owned by the Spanish Government. 

Hereby hangs a tale of UK incompetence, rule-bending, or ‘just how capitalism works’.

Feel free to choose as suits your own perspective, but first, an interesting fact of which I was totally ignorant until recently.

The Belfast shipyard is not the only ‘Harland & Wolff.’ A separate company called Harland & Wolff Group Holdings Plc. ‘owns’ the Belfast shipyard Harland & Wolff (Belfast) and three other UK shipyards.

A holding company is one that owns other companies and oversees their operations. It exists solely to operate those subsidiaries.

It is only the H&W Group Holding Company that has called in the administrators. None of the four shipyards are part of the insolvency process. All four are operational and ongoing businesses. You might wonder how that could be the case, given that the company that ‘owns’ them currently owes £158 million it can’t pay back right now. £150 million of which may yet fall to the UK taxpayer to repay under a pre-existing government guarantee.

I guess it was counting on the government underwriting the £200 million that they could borrow more, and the profits from the £1.6 billion contract to keep them out the debtor’s prison for another while, metaphorically speaking.

Here is where it gets ‘curiouser and curiouser’ as Alice in Wonderland remarked.

Navanti, the Spanish State-owned company which won the contract to build the ships that can’t be built because H&W Holdings which doesn’t actually build anything but ‘oversees and operates’ the four shipyards that aren’t themselves insolvent – is, according to the Financial Times, currently paying the running costs, wages etc. of all four UK companies on a week-by-week basis, even though it doesn’t own them at all.

It is not a totally altruistic or crazy risk to take when the prize is perhaps saving the £1.6 billion contract until the ‘holding’/management company is sold to somebody else, and all that happens before it is wound up and the whole pack of cards collapses.

A cynical buyer might let the company go to the wall and pay its own creditors a penny in the pound, apart from the lucky loan company covered by the UK Government guarantee of £150 million!

They might then negotiate with Navanti to keep the UK element of the contract. They would also find it easier to borrow more.

But who might be willing to step in and buy what looks like an over-indebted mismanaged Management Company?

Did I mention an investigation into the company’s ‘misapplication’ of £25 million, which FT reports is already underway?

Fear not! Keir Starmer has had a ‘smarter ‘New Labour idea!

He is reported as ‘urging’ on Navanti to buy H&W Holdings, presumably so that they can then press ahead with the much-delayed boost to the British Navy’s war support and British economic growth.

Navanti, currently keeping shipyards working, appear to be holding out for the UK government to amend the contract value upwards by at least £300 million as the delay is adding to contract delivery costs.

The chances of someone else buying into the delivery without a review must therefore be slim.

The EU thinks the deal is probably against the rules. Spain is in the EU. Nonetheless, if it all comes together, Keir Starmer and Rachael Reeves in waiting potentially saved the taxpayer £200 million by forking out at least £300 million to transfer the operation and oversight of British private sector shipbuilding assets and resources and the entire profit from the contract government contract to the Spanish Government, and possibly another £150 million of the H&W debt.

£450 million!! Good thinking, Batman (and Robin). Jeremy Corbyn would just have nationalised shipbuilding.

I’m thinking of taking a subscription to FT just to read the next installment of the adventures of Rachael and Keir. I think it is about to upset a whole nation of farmers and still get no tax revenue 

Meanwhile, we wait to hear the outcome of the Sham fight between Fianna Fail and Fine Gael south of the border, and whether Sinn Féin upset the applecart. My guess is that whoever forms the next government will do so by making promises they won’t keep to successful independents, left, right and centre.