Letters to Government Representatives
Aims
The aim is to raise the profile of the Ansty closure with elected
representatives – your local councilors, your local MP and your
region’s MEPs. This is especially important for non-Coventry
constituencies, where representatives may not even be aware that it
affects their constituents. But even within Coventry, the more
emails sent by constituents, the more important / relevant the
issue will be to more representatives.
Writing emails is a small start. But it is important that the
issue is known and relevant to more representatives. As a minimum,
this is a way of building awareness of the issue, and improving the
likelihood that representatives will raise the issue and vote in
favour of measures to alleviate the affects of the closure.
You may think writing emails will achieve very little. However,
not writing the emails will definitely achieve nothing!
Contact your representatives
The following Web sites allow constituents to e-mail their local
councilors, MP and MEPs (your region may have more than one MEP –
you could email them all).
The following form of words can be used as ideas for your emails,
or simply pasted into the forms provided by the web sites. The
number of emails sent, as well as the actual content of the email,
is important.
WriteToThem - Email or fax your Councillor, MP, MEP, MSP or Welsh,
NI, London Assembly Member for free
Or, specifically for contacting MPs: UK
Parliament - Alphabetical list of MPs
Share your thoughts/arguments
If you would
like to share your emails with us – especially if you’re raising
some specific issues that could be relevant to our campaign – you
can forward them to ansty.park@googlemail.com
Ericsson’s Legacy - the lost heritage of
Plessey, GEC and Marconi
The proposed closure of Ericsson’s development
activities at Ansty, near Coventry, is a drastic proposal that
affects us all, following hot on the closure of the Ericsson
ex-Plessey/Marconi site in Beeston Nottingham two years ago with a
significant loss of jobs.
Ericsson’s are now proposing to close
the brand new Ansty facility with all the jobs going to low cost
centres around the world.
It is proposed that most of the jobs will be
going to China, India and Italy with some software work moving to a
Canadian site supported by funding from the Canadian
government.
The proposal, if carried through, will lead to
some 700 redundancies, leaving many people from Coventry,
Birmingham, Nuneaton, Rugby, Nottingham and elsewhere without
work.
Ericsson is known for its design, development,
manufacture and management of mobile telephone networks and
equipment. The heritage it obtained with the purchase of Marconi
supports much of the UK’s telecommunications infrastructure.
Ericsson’s drastic proposal to depart from
Ansty, to ‘asset-strip’ the intellectual property to cheaper
labour markets, threatens the reliability of their products and the
long term maintenance of UK’s vital telecommunications networks –
companies such as ‘3’, T-Mobile, 02, BT, Virgin, Vodaphone are
likely to be impacted.
We will be petitioning the UK Government to
take action to prevent the closure and loss of 700 highly skilled
jobs at the Ericsson Research and Development and Global Services
Centre at Ansty Park Coventry.
We are asking for the Government to provide
the necessary funding to allow UK workers to be competitive with
workers in so called low cost countries.
We are requesting the Government to award
Ericsson UK Contracts for Technology, for example under the
proposed government Smart Metering or Broadband Britain initiative,
as an incentive to keep jobs in the UK.
We will also be asking Government to recognise
the importance of the Global Services and Research and Development
Expertise we have within Ericsson and keep the UK at the forefront
of technology.
I respectfully request your support with our
efforts to keep these UK jobs.
