An interesting read
 

Take a look HERE

It may be something you've read before, but nonetheless interesting, including the comments left by the readers of the article.

If nothing else, MGJohn will find a lot which resonates.

Brian :D

Can't remember the title but some years ago I read a revealing book about the merger of our motor industry into British Leyland. The conclusion was that Donald Stokes had the impossible task of combining and rationalising some 40 separate plants from Austin and Morris to Land Rover and Leyland trucks into a cohesive whole. None of the chiefs would relinquish their segment - William Lyons undersold the Jag and the Mini made a profit of £35 on each one sold. I may be wrong here but I don't believe that Red Robbo or anyone else from the union side ever was involved in design investment decisions - appalling management must take the major share of the blame. (I recently ran a Stag which should of course have had the Buick bought-in RV8 but internal marque competition stopped it.) Need I go on?

But then the UK has never valued engineering, at least since the steam age. Look at today: so called British Steel in administration as I write. Is the City going to step up to the plate? Is it . . . Some Turkish fund may or may not buy it. And now we're immersed in B . . . t.

I think the article sums up the situation of how UK car manufacturing got to where it is absolutely 100%. Also this British attitude has had this effect on most of our traditional industries and is the reason our once great engineering heritage is now just about all gone.

All the best bits of industry gets bought up by the Germans/EU bankers. They steal the best bits and flog the rest off cheap. They are doing it all around the "lesser" countries in the EU. Massive loans which are snapped up and spent, then demand the money back (Yeah right) and Bob's yer uncle, another cheap purchase for ???? Guess who!;)

Yep! - Spot on RB - but please don’t start me off again........:D:D

I'm intrigued by this view.

Any chance you could spell out the relative volumes (in financial and industrial terms) of the UK industries purchased by the Germans, the rest of the EU states, the US and China?

Also, given that we are allegedly at the pinnacle of the financial trading world, what do you think stops us (the UK financial/investment institutions including banks) from buying these industries?

One could presume that the reason these German/EU (and other) institutions can buy Uk industry is that the industries are for sale to whoever is willing to buy them and is able/willing to invest in engineering industries. If that is the case, how does it become stealing if they keep some bits of them and sell off the rest?

Finally, could this be a case of the UK not wishing to invest but always wanting to blame others for doing it better and the consequences?

I would welcome your thoughts.

PS It would also be useful to have your view on the fact that we in the UK now buy millions of tons of cheap imported rubbish each year. Who should we blame for this - the people who produce it and are willing to sell it to us or those who buy it in preference to home produced not so cheap but higher quality goods.

Good question Maninder - I trust you will accept the answer

If you read the comments, you still in 2019 have the left blame the right blame the left and the middle blame everyone lol. I had this talk with my farther who is a retied engineer from BA and he said that the UK has always preferred the banking service industry over engineering industry.

I totally agree - most people in Government or in senior positions in “public service” have anything but Science or Engineering degree or qualifications.

And this is a long term significant issue for the U.K. It’s referenced in the article whereby the U.K. car industry was described as being run by amateurs.

Kick a man when he is down:-
Bankers???
:shrug:and more!

Back on topic. When I was off work in 2017 with cancer, reading was something I did a great deal of.
AROnline is a brilliant website with lots of independent essays on a whole range of topics relating to the British car industry. Also there is a light hearted documentary by Mr Clarkson called “Who killed the British car industry”.
The rot set in around the early 50’s. Yes as far back as that. That’s when the downward spiral was set in motion. My summary is like this.
Leonard Lord, buffoon egotistic ruled over a business with 50% market share and made it his job to set the price of the cars on his own. Really? They barely made a profit on all those cars. No profit means no reinvestment in engineering, quality or development of new cars. He also fell out with Lord Nuffield and vowed to get revenge.
The mini was priced too cheap. It should have catapulted the business into a new era but again, no profit to reinvest.
Too much reliance on Patriotic sales gave false indicators on the car market when others were active in market research and acting on it.
Wrong people in charge. Lord Stokes was a great salesman but a poor businessman. He failed to act to make BL lean and efficient. Some say he had an impossible job but he had no ruthless streak in him.
The rise of the unions and their power dragged down productivity and it never really recovered. The competition were far more proactive in building more cars per hour.
Reputations stick. Between 1969 and 1980 BL produced probably its worst batch of cars ever. Strikes were common and morale was rock bottom. Love him or loathe him, Michael Edwardes saw the problem and tried to tackle it. Too late.
Once the Metro started to dissolve on Britain’s highways, patriotism dissolved with it and we all took a serious look at foreign cars and found them to be rather good.
Honda was a blessing and a missed opportunity. Government should have knocked down doors to make the partnership permanent. Failed. By 1990 the Honda based cars were picking up a good following and in 1993 the Rover was and is a great car.
By the time BMW took over it was beyond saving and they took what they wanted and left a dying pig behind.
It’s been a fascinating read and I have asked my wife to get one of the children to buy me James Rupperts book for my birthday so I can try and learn a bit more!

No easy answer to this, as a Nation we spent much money on two world wars and were being overtaken as a world power economy by Germany and the USA both prior and during this time. We adopted are praiseworthy attitude of defending democracy and liberty which we could not afford in reality and bankrupted ourselves as a result. We made massive loans to allies some (Russian) were never repaid at all, Much of British industry became under financed less modernised and less competitive, management was old fashioned,complacent and much influenced by "the old boy" network, and workers were influenced by this and strong communist agitation, and a general "that's good enough" attitude. Post WW2 we launched into the massive money eating Social and/national health service another unaffordable scheme which reinforced the lazy attitude of many of our citizens and also allowed our education system,(not a particulary good one] to get worse by lowering standards so now literacy is lower than in 1944. There were and are bright sparks in this picture but that's what they are "sparks" and Government does nothing/very little to fan the flames. But hey what do I know- maybe someone will come along and try and change things, make us work hard,try harder, because things need to change or else. Cheers Chris.S.

Thank you, Thank you, Thank you :bowdown:

These links really do need to be given a wider audience.

These threads seem to always result in blaming the unskilled British workforce. :eek:

If we use Post-Fordism for example, Britain was forced to become a service based industry because we were outdone at manufacturing, other countries simply produce better quality goods, plain and simple. ;)

We are good in the service sector, business services, retail and finance... that's it. :shrug: :getmecoat:

I would add Research and Development to that list Wes.

Excellent Summary - as I understand it Honda was truly mortified that our politicians treated them with such contempt. To be honest - I have always been surprised that Honda ever saw fit to trust a U.K. Government again.

I (still) blame Mrs Thatcher . . .

We are just pen-pushers Clive, good at creation and innovation. :D

In this modern age, its more like keyboard-tappers. ;)

I used to visit many manufacturing businesses during my working life. The research and development done was second to none. We produced products which lasted a lifetime, unlike the "lifetime" guarantees we get today! Some of the companies I visited included Mintex, Timken and Hepworth and Grandage. Built in obsolescence and the throw away revolution has made the "quality" items a thing of the past. Life is now a "marketing exercise" with "spares no longer available" being the current style. The spares that are available throughout manufacturing are generally poor quality items. We are being hoodwinked into buying more and more to be better than our peers. Remember the base, L, XL, Ghia and Executive models that appeared in the 60's and 70's? I was very proud of a family member who refused to go to his "Prom" as a protest about how much was being wasted.

Good heavens, banks that made exceptionally high risk loans totaling Euro400billion, to a country which had bankrupted itself by living way beyond its means, made a profit by charging interest. Whatever next - I guess my bank will want to charge me interest when I go in asking for funds to buy my dream Learjet and Sunseeker!

I was hoping for some statistical analysis centred around industrial buyouts - not links to political articles from newspapers about the unreasonableness of European banks charging interest. :shrug:

Rather than worrying about the car industry, for which it is far too late, an example of the question each of us should ask ourselves is this. With my broadband, telephone and mobile services, am I buying these from BT - the only telecomms company that makes huge investments in UK jobs and infrastructure - or one of the foreign owned/invested companies whose profits and much quality employment go overseas. The answer will tell each of us all we need to know as about ourselves and our patriotism as individuals.

Also, note that the French made equally bad cars but kept on buying them for reasons of national pride and patriotism. They had the same dynamics in terms of industrial relations as the UK if not worse. The result is that they have Europe's second largest car industry.

Gentlemen - the problems lies not with others, but yourselves as patriotic UK citizens.

Good point. Don't blame the Russians for everything. At least they are up front about their dislikes. Our good friend the USA wanted us bankrupt and leapt at the chance during WW2. Knock us off our pedestal. Of course we'll help you brother, just give us shed loads of cash for the material you want. And we being the upright citizen paid it off until the 1990's, IIRC.

Wonder why they are flipping off now. Elephantine memories?

Whilst BT do provide investment in the UK infrastructure, they also manage to truly p off very long standing customers with un-necessary billing for phones that you paid off many years ago. My father was being charged £16 a quarter for a jack diddly squat very basic phone service. Just like good old British Gas who will not move on their inflated prices.

If these companies treated long standing customers with respect (my father was with BT and British Gas for 50 years!), adjust their prices due to competition (or shock horror suggest moving to a better tariff :eek:) and not like sheep who will blindly observe their patriotic duty to stay with them, they may not be hemorrhaging the numbers of customers they currently are.

QED. :}

Do we not see here the reasons we no longer have a car industry, even though we like to blame everyone but ourselves?

We now have (and have had for a few decades) a situation where the masses have turned critics and most of the populus pursue their pathetic little agendas instead of worrying about the bigger picture and the common good. The result is that the once great industrial base is being eroded day-by-day because someone can buy a non-UK manufactured product for 50p cheaper due to strategic pricing by those who will simply walk away when it suits in the interest of pure profit.

I suspect this message will not win me any new friends here, but as I said in my earlier post, it is all the making of ourselves collectively and no one else.

She didn’t help most certainly!

But politicians are politicians and whatever the colour - they usually make a pigs ear out of things.

To my mind it was Benn and Wilson who cemented the demise of the U.K. car industry by their belligerent insistence that BMH and Leyland merge.

Tony Benn in particular was guilty IMO - of bizarre swively eyed lunacy on a regular basis. Even Harold Wilson described him as becoming more immature with age.

After 66 years on this planet - with 50 of them being intensely interested in our politicians stupidity - I am just as bemused and suffer the same despair now as I did as a young adult.

I had hoped that the then Labour government would have saved Rover from going to the wall, but sadly they didn't seem interested.

Our lorry manufacturing industry went the same way as our car industry too. Many once familiar names now history. :getmecoat:

I remember Tony Blair wanted to save Rover, it was Gordon Brown who pulled the plug. :mad:

Funny how the title "Engineer" is revered in many countries as highly as "Doctor", but is ignored in the UK, despite our great industrial heritage...

Yes - surprising that - especially as he (Gordon Brown) went on to bail out the Banks in 2008 after a decade of inept regulation by his “Super Regulator” the FSA.

He effectively designed and set up the FSA against the advice of those around him and combined elements of the effective tripartite BoE, DTI and the old PIA.

In doing so we lost the specialist expert knowledge of each third of the tripartite Regulatory System and shoved all the responsibility onto inexperienced people all under one roof so everyone kept quiet about the coming storm.

Gordon Brown saved the Banks because not to do so would underline the abject failure of something he was entirely responsible for.

So we all suffered the consequences of his ego.

His justification was that the “Banks were too big to fail”.

IMO he really felt that it was his ego that could not take the hit. So he made the entire population of the U.K. pay.

With a succession of idiots like this in charge of No 10 and No 11 - what chance did a vehicle manufacturer stand?

NEWS FLASH!

It’s just been announced that HS2 is likely to be cancelled!

So all the disruption- the compulsory purchase of property for way less than market value - has it all been for nought? :duh:

Yes - Germany being an excellent example. There, a person has to have a minimum set of relevant engineering qualifications, experience and accreditation to professional bodies in order to call him/her self an Engineer.

But, we must not overlook the importance of our engineers. Every year, an engineer from a local business visits my house and does an excellent job of sucking the entire content of the septic tank with a big hosepipe connected to his truck.

Yes - strange that we celebrate the likes of Brunel and show him off to the world during the opening ceremony of the London Olympic Games when we normally ignore our achievements at best or more usually decry them as somehow “wrong”.

How odd that some revere a young 16 year old girl for putting herself and others at considerable extra risk by crossing the Atlantic in a Sail Boat rather than do what most people do and fly?

Virtue Signalling as its best and most bizarre. Especially as it’s been revealed now that by saving her one air journey, the crew have had to make FOUR flights over the Atlantic! :duh:

Two new crew members flew out from the U.K. to sail the boat back and two who crewed on the way over have flown back from the US.

Barmy.

Slightly off thread but I when a British company moves into foreign ownership I reckon it should change its name accordingly.
British Airways
British Airports Authority
Thames Water
Scottish Power
National Grid
Royal Mail
etc etc should all be prefixed with the country that owns them and received the profits.
Would also be nice if every time a Union Flag was displayed on a product it was accompanied by a bit of text saying "The Union Flag is a trade mark of the United Kingdom and has been licensed to Acme Industries Inc (or whoever) of China (or wherever). It does not indicate where this product was produced.

You have a point - I notice that the Vauxhall van adverts now state that Vauxhall is a “British Brand”. Which is interesting given which company now owns the brand.

Perhaps modern MG’s could be similarly advertised?

May I suggest you do write that book. What you outline above resonates with my experience. Tho’ to be fair, whilst I clearly recognise many aspects of what you have set out, my experience of the Private Sector and the Public Sector was that the Public Sector was very much worse.

This was because despite monumental “Male Chicken ups” the Public Sector never had to worry about Profit. In fact - many of those in the Public Sector I worked with saw the very idea of “Profit” as akin to something you trod in.

There idea of “work” was meetings - lots of them, and with lots of people. It was normal to attend a meeting and the head guy would come in flanked by his assistant and a couple of his or her under managers - all of which had assistants to take notes - and then their would be me.

This series of meetings would go on for months and as often as not they would conclude that whatever it was was not a good idea and the notion would be scrapped.

Invariably the summary would be along the self justification lines of:-

“All these meetings have been a valuable use of time effort and resources because we now know what we are not going to do.”

I hope you do write a book - I’m writing mine.

I like the idea. When BMC had 50% market share, customers knew it was a British company and patriotic sales were plentiful.
Today many of us would struggle to know who owns what. Talking to a RAC patrolman recently we discussed how many times ownership of it has changed since I left in 1993. As a result it spends a great deal of money modifying and adapting to the whims of its new owner. That can only be a waste of resources and not focusing on the business at hand.

I suspect it is because we the public would have punished the Labour party hard at the elections for "wasting public money" had they done so.

The majority of the population see support for industry as a waste of public resources. The banks, on the other hand, were different in that the individual interests of many would have been directly impacted had a few of the big banks been allowed to collapse.

I have read many people argue in the media that if a school is unable to work within the allocated budget, it should be allowed to collapse in the same way as "any other business". I suspect the same people would be complaining if their child was not getting the teaching that they believed he/she deserved.

Hi David - I was of course only saying how I believe it was/would have been and not that it was right for the UK or the population. Unfortunately, the UK considers the financial/banking sector to be far mot strategic than engineering and manufacturing which leads to the former sector being characterised by personal and institutional greed. As someone with engineering in his blood - spent whole life in engineering, brother a professional engineer, sister a STEM professional and both kids at uni studying engineering - in my opinion this is a sorry state of affairs.

But, we elect those who set the UK strategy....

I suspect most people in the UK prefer to support Japanese rather than indigenous manufacturers. This is well demonstrated by the fact that goods sell better when they are given Japanese sounding names even though designed/made by a British company in the UK e.g. GEC/Hitachi TVs in the 1980s, certain precision instruments etc.

Perhaps MGR should have renamed itself to sound Japanese?

You are quite correct - the system was set up so that a bank could fail - the investors compensation scheme was there and could easily have sorted it.

The Americans did just that with Lehman Brothers and the mortgage providers Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.

The result was less than two years of some disruption for the US.

In contrast - saving Gordon Browns “Super Regulator” by propping up the Banks with more and more taxpayers money put us into an economic decline that lasted a decade.

Much as it may pain me to say so but I entirely agree with this.:}
Very true I'm afraid

I’ve had to go and have a lay down .......

Get on with your book, lazy beggar:D

French car industry success, yes French people baught French cars British people baught foreign cars The French government had a plan (evidently) which was to make their industrial base the best in the world and regardless of what the politics of their government they stuck to it most of the time. whether they achieved it and/or it lasts remains to be seen, but they did much better than we British. There are many other factors that effected our growth but I believe it was a lack of Government "long view" that was the prime problem, the same with Trade Union leaders. Chris.S.

A bit like the chinese did with Roewe? A British name to give a local product prestige.

Sent from my SM-A600FN using Tapatalk

I’ve posted this study before goes a long way back to the decline.
https://insight.jbs.cam.ac.uk/2008/who-killed-mg-rover/

Good analysis in that report. The problem IMO that became insurmountable was the merger forced by Wilson and Benn of Leyland and BMH.

Imagine now having two Nissan dealers in the same town with customers able to wander from one to the other to get a deal?

Michael Edwards tried to sort the mess out but it was never going to work.