DEFENCE minister George Robertson's mission to Germany today to rescue the troubled £35billion four-nation Eurofighter project, on which 40,000 jobs hang in Britain alone, may be as much a test of the new government's resolve as it is of Bonn's.

For despite the election campaign pledges, the defence review that Mr Robertson has now undertaken has already provoked Tory claims that the Eurofighter's is not safe with Labour and sparked recollections of how the then plane-of-the-future, the TSR2, was scrapped by a new Labour administration in the 1960s.

For the sake of thousands of Lancashire aerospace jobs, New Labour must live up to its promises, not its past.

It is, however, in the German court that the ball currently lies.

For though it accepts the need to replace its obsolete Phantom fighters, Germany is in deep trouble with its budget deficit.

Yet if those constraints lead Germany to think that it cannot afford the Eurofighter - and deciding so might jeopardise the viability of the whole project - perhaps Mr Robertson today needs to speak some Keynesian words to his counterpart Volker Ruehe and to himself.

That is, for all the strains on their budgets, neither the wavering Germany nor the under-new-management Britain, nor the project's lesser partners, Italy and Spain, can afford not to back the plane for two vital reasons - jobs and the future of European aerospace.

The Eurofighter is the biggest collaborative industrial project in Europe - equivalent to four Channel Tunnels - and will produce more than 250,000 jobs at its peak.

On top of that, the vital high-tech skills that would be lost would never come back if, as a consequence, the USA was to emerge as the world leader in aerospace and the pencilled-in huge export orders for the Eurofighter would never be realised.

No government can afford, politically or economically, to destroy so much employment and, effectively export jobs toU the other side of the Atlantic.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.