Indigo Jo Blogs

Politics, tech and media issues from a Muslim perspective

Another British industry falls

by · 8th April, 2005

So it appears that the receivers have been called in on the Rover car company, after it stopped production yesterday due to a “component shortage”. This time the reason is that negotiations with a Chinese state car manufacturer have broken down over a £100 million “bridging loan”. Whatever that is. And now, it appears that Rover doesn’t actually have many assets of its own - it doesn’t own the land on which its plant lies (it sold that and leased it back), or its brand name (BMW owns it), but does own a stately home worth £8,000,000. Perhaps they could do a Bernard Matthews and turn it into a car plant?

Which raises the question of what it is about this country that we can’t keep our manufacturing industries going, and in British hands, when our competitors can. Since Thatcher and, particularly, John Major, came to power, we’ve lost one major automotive industry after another. We’ve lost Leyland trucks to the Dutch and then the Americans, along with Foden. MAN (a German truck builder) bought ERF, then moved production to Germany. Iveco (owned by Fiat and the German Deutz company) bought Seddon Atkinson, then moved to Spain.

British trucks were never as good as Volvos or MANs (the early Mercedes Actros was a notorious exception). I once read in a trucking magazine of a company which fell out with its Volvo dealership, and decided without hesitation that their next truck would be a Scania. The Swedes have the right idea, they said - they build their components to go together, rather than cobbling together other people’s bits and calling it a truck. British trucks were thought of as “gaffers’ wagons”, meaning trucks bought because they were cheap - drivers prefer continental trucks. Fodens and ERFs both had fibreglass cabs, which some people liked because they didn’t rust. Their engines, axles and gearboxes were bought from American companies like Cummins, Meritor and Eaton respectively. Again, some people bought them because of this.

In recent years the trucks have got vastly more comfortable and modern, and as the British makers were bought out and moved abroad, their decor was brought more into line with that of their owners’ trucks. And the same goes for the car industry - it’s not as if that stayed static either. Rover cars (and Austins before them) were never rubbish - we had three Austin-Rovers in succession and they were pretty fast and comfortable, and more recent Rovers were based on engineering shared with a Japanese maker (not sure which one).

And even if they were, that didn’t stop Skoda from being turned around once Communism fell. Remember all those bad jokes about Skodas? (What’s the difference between a Skoda and a Jehovah’s Witness? You can shut the door on a Witness!) Well, the company was bought out by VW after the Communist régime fell and is now a respectable brand again. On the other hand, BMW (admittedly a company with less resources than VW; it doesn’t make commercial vehicles) failed to turn around Rover, and ended up selling it for £10. But I don’t see why Rover needs a foreign buy-out to recover from its present malaise. It needs investment, and a solid new model.

But I don’t expect this to happen, because British policy since Thatcher has been to run down British manufacturing, not restore it. They don’t want a significant working-class constituency to exist, because then you get those nasty trade-unionist troublemakers. Our industry has moved towards providing services, which is all very well until we need goods from countries which are unwilling or unable to provide them. I have long suspected that our country’s tireless insistence on participating in American military adventures has been at least partly motivated by the American ownership of companies like Leyland and Vauxhall. How is this country to stand on its own if it fears angering the foreign owners of its industries?

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