Vestas workers are on the TV news calling for nationalisation: the first meeting to shows its solidarity was in Portsmouth, which started just as the occupation began. One of Socialist Resistance’s members there send this report:

The meeting which was hosted by UNISON POrtsmouth City Branch was attended by over 30 local people. The meeting was informed that no striker from Vestas was present for a very good reason - the workers had just occupied the factory to prevent the company from moving any equipment. The meeting was then addressed by the convenor of the UNISON branch and speakers from the RMT, the Green Party and Jonathan Neale from the Campaign Against Climate Change.

The RMT speaker is a trade union activist who lives on the IOW and has been centrally involved in the local support group. He made the key political point that it is not the Vestas company that is needed but the factory - so if the company goes the key demand is nationalisation. The fact that the workers are occupying the factory effectively raises the issue of workers’ control.

Jonathan Neale as well as linking the fight to save jobs with the environmental issues - the factory is the only producer of wind turbines in the country and in Britain wind is the most effective form of alternative energy - called on those present at the meeting to immediately go over to the IOW to form a picket outside the factory in solidarity with the occupying workers. He also explained the courageous nature of their struggle as these are non-unionised workers - individual workers who have in the past attempted to set up a union have been hounded out of the factory by management.

Anyone who can is now urged to get over to the factory, which is on an industrial estate just outside Newport, to join the picket. The next major public event is a rally in the centre of Newport - St Thomas Square - at 17.30 on Friday. For anyone travelling by train from or via London (Waterloo) get a return ticket to Ryde and get off the train at Portsmouth Harbour (the last station on the line) - the ferry is at the end of the station, and many buses go from Ryde to Newport.