TORIES are letting British shipbuilding “die out in the name of the free market,” unions charged today as 150 job losses were announced at Babcock’s Rosyth shipyard.

The company said it had deemed “around 150 specific roles” as “no longer needed” after it had “assessed our current workload and medium-term opportunities.”

The yard, in the Firth of Forth in Fife, was known as the Royal Naval Dockyard Rosyth before its privatisation in the 1990s. It has lately served as the site of final assembly for new naval aircraft carriers but work on these is now winding down.