Adjournment debate

On 19 March 2012, the Labour MP for Glasgow North West, John Robertson, led a debate on the future of shipbuilding.

Britain's new 65,000-tonne aircraft carriers have been partly built at BAE Systems at Govanon on the river Clyde. The pieces are being built at six shipyards around the UK and slotted together at Rosyth in Fife using an enormous crane which was transported by sea from China.

The Clyde has a long history of shipbuilding. The Cunard liners Queen Elizabeth and Queen Mary were both built on the Clyde in the 1930s at John Brown's shipyard on Clydebank. The trans-Atlantic liners were, in their time, the biggest and the fastest afloat.