Tuesday 30 June 2009

When it's gone, it's gone.

Yesterday was like most other week days; I got up, got ready, went to work, came home, did a little shopping and rounded the day off by providing the usual taxi service for my daughter, Lucy.

However, I live in Coventry and the events regarding the demise of even more of our motor manufacturing industry put a different light on these mundane activities.

After rising shortly after six o’clock I stood and looked out of the patio doors whilst the kettle boiled, looking over the fields to gauge the weather, I saw the sun briefly glinting of the rubble of the Jaguar Browns Lane factory a mile or so over the main A45 Birmingham Road, I knew that, whatever was going on there today, is did not involve the manufacture of motor cars. I recalled a story told to me by a colleague from their PR department regarding the occasional request from US Jaguar fans asking about the possibility of having a brick from the factory sent to them as a memento – they could have as many as they want now.

I left the house at around seven fifteen and took my usual route to work. The trip takes me past the Massey Ferguson factory in Banner Lane, A great example of 1930’s architecture with a huge monstrosity of a modern office block blotting the landscape. Not many people know that it started life as the Standard Motors factory, none of the younger generation will remember that this site used to supply the world with tractors and farm machinery. The ‘developers’ are in there now but the current economic crisis has forced even this activity to stop.

In the evening we popped out to Sainsbury’s to top up our provisions, the new store standing on the site of the Rover Canley factory, formerly Standard Triumph and from there we made our way into Coventry city centre past the Armstrong Siddeley and Rolls Royce factory, now a low cost hotel which has retained the old Armstrong Siddeley factory gates as an ornament.

Reminders of our motoring heritage are everywhere in this city. It is preserved in the Coventry Business School building which used to make Morris engines and in the street names which bear the names of the cars, cycles and motorcycles which used to be built here but, sadly, there is not much evidence of a live thriving industry any more.

It is true that we still produce a lot of cars in the UK but for how long? Frequent fluctuations in the global economy result in the need to adjust the numbers of cars built and the truth is that it is simply cheaper and easier and quicker to ‘reduce’ a British workforce than their counterparts anywhere else in Europe.

I was deeply affected by the plight of the Longbridge and more recently LDV workers. They are good, hard working people who are dedicated to building motor cars. They have not lost one minute to industrial action in the best part of twenty five years and have accepted every new working practice – and there have been a few, directed at them with good grace. True, productivity there was low but don’t confuse this with laziness, due to half a century of underinvestment, some of the production lines there were good examples of how cars were built a quarter of a century ago, indeed, until the old mini ended production recently, a visitor could engage in industrial archaeology and see how cars were built fifty years ago.

My own view is that Rover was sold off to BMW with suspicious haste at a time when the company was making profits in excess of £80 million. LDV has suffered the same indifference from our government. Subsequent events have proved that the German management had no idea of the relevance of this company to the British public and, more importantly, media and did not care at all about its importance to the British economy. The Russian owners of LDV have demonstrated that they also could care less about developing a strategic UK industry.

After the inevitable failure of BMW following some rather dubious statements regarding losses using their own eccentric accounting methods, the UK government should have behaved just like a French, German or Italian government would have and acted in the national interest to ensure that a major, strategic part of our industrial infrastructure remained viable. Instead ministers lined up to be seen as being concerned in front of the workers for the benefit of the media in the light of a looming election – just like now. After the election, with the exception of Richard Burden, Northfield’s hard working MP; they simply walked away apart from setting up some sort of task force which remained largely unheard from but has cost £14 million. With LDV, our own minister could not even take place in the negotiations because of a past incident with the Russian oligarch owner and a luxury yacht.

Just like my travels around Coventry demonstrated, when it’s gone, its gone and I am worried about just who is fighting for real jobs for all those skilled workers in our manufacturing industry.

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