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It's not a good time for the Clyde's shipbuilders to be either gloating about surviving the defence review, nor fretting about the future. Yet they've got reason to do both.

The gloating should be avoided when they consider the pain inflicted elsewhere. Compared with the hit that Moray is going to take with the closure of RAF Kinloss and possibly also RAF Lossiemouth, the loss of the carrier contracts, with 4,000 jobs, would have hit Glasgow proportionately less hard.

The evidence from a report commissioned by Highlands and Islands Enterprise underlines the case that Moray is the area of Britain most dependent on the RAF.

Published in August, Reference Economics showed Kinloss has 2,340 employees, and pumps £68m into the economy, while Lossiemouth has 3,370, with a spending impact of £90m.

It counted 1,457 spouses and 1,919 children aged up to 16 - totalling 7% of Moray's population and supporting 16% of its workforce.

And even with whisky doing well along Speyside, there aren't that many jobs in it for the county. Moray's pay has been among the lowest in the country.

It has to make you wonder if that cross-party lobby for the aircraft carriers was some way off target, and should have focused on risks further north.

Cat and trap

Anyway, this is no time to gloat about keeping jobs elsewhere, least of all on building two giant aircraft carriers which won't carry planes for a decade, if at all.

The plans to modify them for "cat and trap" use (catapult launch and arrestor device for landing) by American or French aircraft is either to prepare them for sale or for "interoperable" joint use. And as the French have already postponed their decision to build a new aircraft carrier (they bailed out early and expensively from a joint design programme with the UK) the Paris government might nevertheless be quite grateful for the opportunity to buy a nearly-new porte-avion, so long as it's at well below the vast cost price.

There's a hint in the Strategic Defence and Security Review that this could be on condition that the buyer could hand it back while the one Royal Navy carrier is unavailable through refit or other duties. More on that with the next review promised in 2015.

Meanwhile, as nothing comes cheap in defence procurement, stand by for a hefty bill for adapting to this "carrier variant" model. The decks will have to be flattened, and the cat and trap kit added. The in-service date of the Queen Elizabeth has been put back from 2016 to "around 2020". Delays like that don't usually come cheap.

Piracy patrol

So why should the two Clyde yards fret? They're surely the big winners? Well, it's back to the question of what happens after large chunks of the Queen Elizabeth and Prince of Wales (HMS Charles de Gaulle?) have been floated down river on their way to Rosyth.

The Clyde work dries up in about five years. David Cameron announced "a new programme of less expensive, modern frigates, more flexible and better able to take on today's naval tasks of tackling drug trafficking, piracy and counter-terrorism".

So far so good for shipbuilding contracts. But he also said the size of the Royal Navy is being reduced. From 13 frigates at present, four are to go, taking the Royal Navy's fleet of major combat ships down to 19 in total. That means fewer ships need replaced. And look at the commitment in the SDSR: "As soon as possible after 2020 the Type 23 will be replaced by Type 26 frigates".

For those who hoped to see a firm commitment to a steady work flow for Scotstoun and Govan, "as soon as possible after 2020" stops some way short. All the more reason to step up those export efforts.