h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4422705.stm

The demise of Rover.

How's this going to affect the campaign?

Put it this way: I really don't envy Labour canvassers in the West Midlands this week.

I doubt whether it will have a huge impact, to be honest. There aren't that many marginal seats in the area, they all tend to be solid for one party or another.

Anyway, will anyone believe that the Tory party had they been in power would have stumped up the cash to keep the business going? I don't think so.

Can't fault that observation

But the deeper story is quite subtle. Some might say that Labour's real gaffe was letting the buy-out go through in the first place, and particularly allowing the management to take substantial moneys out.

You might even say that the same management have cynically stretched the death-throes into the election campaign, in the expectation of a handout of taxpayers' money to keep the whole sorry affair off the stump.

That's probably why the DTI has apparently reacted so brusquely with what might have been a premature receivership declaration.

Hi GD
(Love the name-extension, btw)

The Tories wouldn't have done, of course.
From me at least, they'd get a tick for saying they wouldn't have done.
Won't happen, will it? Instead they'll get a black mark for trying to make it sound like they might have saved it.

I enthusiastically support assistance for the structural bastions of UK manufacturing engineering. I find it hard to believe that Longbridge still deserved such a claim, though.

The Chinese only wanted the technology and the marques they never wanted the workforce - they are expendable........it's just another manufacturing industry sold down the river by this bloody lot!

I've never been a great fan of the state propping up failing industries. The only exception to that rule would have been the coal industry. On the basis that once you close an uneconomic pit, you could never reopen it once the market picked up a bit, as geological movement would have smashed everything underground and made it impossible to access.

Four-nil? It was a good night, and well worth the two tanks of petrol it cost me to drive up there

Now now.
One thing that can't reasonably be laid at Labour's door is the demise of UK manufacturing.
The structural damage was done in Thatcher's time.
I don't take an inflexible position on many points (honest), but I'd be very surprised if you could produce economic data to gainsay conservative culpability.

Not that facing down Red Robbo was a bad thing. Labour's own greatest culpability at Longbridge was from the 60s, tolerating the development of the industrial relations that earned the plant its enduring pariah status among investors.

Whoops. Out of phase. I was answering CH.

Interesting that you except coal. I reckon coal was the worst industry Britain ever had. Evil working conditions, for a paltry commodity we could have bought in. In the end, the (disgraceful) national distribution of wealth caused a truly perverse situation. Communities who deserved better were left literally fighting to retain their dreadful employment, with the economic justification of their exploitation long gone.

The worst legacy of coal is that the struggle was so poisonous that it made it easy for the politicians to damage more worthwhile industries and institutions.

We decimated some good manufacturing engineering. OK, they needed help, but a Government that had funded that instead of the farmers would now be sitting on a better-structured economy. We'd have a balance-sheet, for a start.

And we killed the craft unions and kept the public sector ones. Some triumph that was!

Morning Pinniped

Could we go back a bit here?

As a boy , When 'manufacturing' was King I remember Glaswegian Shipbuilders going on strike over who should draw the chalk line on steel plates for the Oxy acetylene cutter to follow.
Where are ships built now?

I also remember Liverpool Dockers striking over the introduction of Containerisation. Where is the biggest Euro Container Port now?

The answer to both the above is NOT IN THE UK

It has only little to do with political parties. Granted they will always seek to blame each other for the woes of industry , whereas the real truth lies in a mixture of bad management, bad labour relations, inflated ideas of importance on BOTH sides of industry, but in the car industry particularly inadequate design and innovation.

Why else do so many of us buy a foreign car. Why is Toyota the most respected brand for reliability? If you drive , what make of car do you have?

British industry has cried "Foul" too many times. Like all of us,'companies carry within themselves the seeds of their own destruction. Good UK companies with good design, good quality, and good management will always hold their own on a level playing field.

But you cannot row back the tide of history. If the Far East, with lower manufacturing costs and better products can outmanufacture and outsell our own companies, they will win the market.

Respectfully
Novo

Hi Novo

Industrial relations in manufacturing industry prior to the mid-80s are a factor in a lot of this. Longbridge is a case in point. Red Robbo may be gone, but his stench is probably still influencing potential investors today.

But commodity manufacture based on volume steel (certainly ship-building and, according to most economists, motor manufacture too) is decided by the primary processing economics. If you want to build merchant ships, for example, you need a 1 Mtpa coastally-located steel plate mill around 5 metres wide, and a shipyard straight outside. The chalk-line and the oxy-torch have gone, because the weld prep is done in the mill shearline, pattern cut to fit, moved fifty metres and fabricated the same day.

Prepared to invest in such primary plant infrastructure? If yes, you're an internationally-viable shipbuilder. If no, end of story.

I agree with some of what you say. But "Good UK companies with good design, good quality, and good management will always hold their own on a level playing field" is not the comment of someone with experience in primary manufacturing industry. In most of manufacturing industry, process is more important than product.

We can't all make widgets. Someone has to produce the materials they're made from, and someone has to make the machines that make them. Toyota's product and quality reputation, as well as its hugely impressive operations management (the real backbone of it business, incidentally) was made possible by Japanese ascendancy in the world steel industry throughout the 70s and 80s. In that firm and most others in the sector, the product designers are bit-part players.

Good afternoon Pinniped

I cannot agree with you here. I don't think I have ever seen such a pious exhibition of 'hand ringing ' as yesterday by No1 and No2 {no names = no pull!}. Having let Mr B at the DTI steer the Rover Group into it's current ownership in the first place, do you not think that a 'concerned for manufacturing' goverment would have kept a close eye on that investment?.

If it was your money or mine , we would have done; but we have here a party which is prepared to have one managerial post for each hospital bed, and which is happy to recruit vaste numbers of Civil Servants so that about 30% of the poulation (if not more) is paid to tell the other 70% what to do, when to do it, and in what way.

And you think Maggie id the damage? If she did it has been compounded by the current govt obsession with rules, forms, targets and paper controls That stifles manufacturing.snuffs out entreprenurial spirit and is fast putting off students who just might study the sciences and/or engineering + technology

Addendum !

I might also remark Pinniped that this government has presided over the loss of something one million manufacturing jobs,
Novo

OK. Read that last post of mine again. It doesn't make any kind of political point at all - only an economic one about the sector.

I don't think your comments are very objective, either. I certainly can't agree with the inference that a national manufacturing economy is fundamentally entrepreunarial.

Thatcher did important things; some good, some less so. She broke the power of the craft Unions, which helped British industry greatly, but she failed to challenge the public sector unions. She advanced a free-market culture, which invigorated some business sectors while damaging the long-term infrastructural investment upon which other sectors rely.

Thatcher's legacy then, whether we like it or not, is Napoleon's jibe - Britain as a nation of shopkeepers.

It's simplistic to see Labour's proliferation of service management as redeemable by a Conservative vision of individual enterprise. Even if either style is truly characteristic of either party, then the models are wrong. We all rely on a very extensive industrial infrastructure that needs a high degree of strategic direction. If you don't see this, you've forgotten Hatfield, as one specific but telling example.

I live in an industrial city and I work in major capital project engineering, and I guess all that colours my opinion. But I do have enough executive experience to know that the small business community's view of its own economic contribution is very often detached from the real nature of its value-chain dependencies.

Most engineers are apolitical, and I'm no exception. What really fires us up is the challenge of building things. Teamwork is everything in the world of engineers. We raise cities. We create world-changing machines, systems and processes. We build the prosperity and future welfare of communities, and of nations, and ultimately of humanity itself. Engineering is a vocation, and moreover one that recognises that individuals achieve very little of lasting importance. Only collective effort and common purpose will develop economies and secures national futures. My own vote will go to whoever demonstrates a belief in that view.