Privatisation
Comments
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Privatisation works in the case of a service or asset that in selling either releases that organisation from government restriction ergo allowing development or allows competiton for the customer business or individual. National infrastructure such as electricity, water, rail, roads etc are not good examples.
If you look at electricity or other utilities the privitisation has allows large corporate consumers to reduce their bills by playing the commodities markets, reduced government spending on all the customer facing stuff like call centres hence the meat market working environment of a call centre. Can you imagine a government department driving the type of workig conditions in a call centre. The consumer is not paying any less though.
Privatisation good for business and government, static or poor for consumers.0 -
I think you cant always blame government.
I grew up near Rover, family and friends parents all worked there and yet when PWC said you need to shed 8000 staff to give yourself a chance of survival the worked voted for the pheonix 4 who said we will keep you all employed.
The staff didnt realise that there was no intention of them keeping jobs and they were simply asset strippers.
Sometimes people (staff) do the wrong thing, maybe goaded ?Living MY dream.0 -
bdu98252 wrote:National infrastructure such as electricity, water, rail, roads etc are not good examples......... The consumer is not paying any less though. .........Privatisation good for business and government, static or poor for consumers.
Not really.
I am guessing that most people here are young enough to not have actually been a bill and taxpayer when we had th ags board, electricity board and water board. the GPo was in the same category. They were all dreadful in every possible way. Slow, inefficient uncaring and you had no choice but yo put up and pay up. 2-3 months to get a new telephone line, months to get connected to the gas supply but if you're rural then forget it.
In real terms, we pay a LOT less for energy, water, etc. As consumers we have choice in most situations and that keeps the suppliers sharp although admittedly we have reached the point where the dominant driver of cost is external to the UK and there's not much anyone can do when Russian gas prices spike. What you can be certain about is that if 'nationalised' then the price would increase as the organisation became even less efficient - all public sector bodies are miracles of inefficiency.
Rail is a tricky one because the rail infrastructure is already nationalized and when people complain that their trains are late, the overwhelming majority of the time, its not actually the private train companies fault, but the nationalised provider of the rail route. If anyone thinks that nationalising the TOC's would improve things, then they are a complete muppet. In the early 90's, BR had more new trains sitting in sidings awaiting release approval than they had on the entire network - due to bureaucracy, standards changes and pure incompetence. You could see most of them around Birmingham. Once the design of the carriages was taken out or BR responsibility, you got a huge leap in efficiency, a drop in manufacturing times and a huge drop in csost.
Public = expensive, private = cheaper but you have to be clear what you are asking to be done.0 -
That's about as close to the definition of a boolean falsehood as it's possible to get.tiredofwhiners wrote:In the early 90's, BR had more new trains sitting in sidings awaiting release approval than they had on the entire networkMangeur0 -
tiredofwhiners wrote:Rail is a tricky one because the rail infrastructure is already nationalized and when people complain that their trains are late, the overwhelming majority of the time,
Dunno what part of the country you're in (or which TOC you work for), but my local effort managed be 'on-time' (based on what they call on-time, not actually arriving when they're supposed to) less than 70% of the time in the three months to the end of 2012. Around half of those were reckoned to be due to staff shortages or train faults.
Having 1 in every 3 trains late isn't what I'd call overwhelming majority on time0 -
My apologies for using a word you find hard to understand or recognise. There has been a clear empirical shift in political and economic policy since that of the post war social democratic models that ran up until the late 70s. Failing to recognise this is synonymous with a failing to recognise its effects on society. Labelling this change in ideology with a symbol is useful if you wish to enter discourse around it.
I can forgive the fervour in which you espouse such a dogmatic ideology as it's something I once participated in. The creation of a false duality of the state vs private by the right is something that makes it so hard to entertain other ideologies. The state vs private false duality is a long standing right-wing position that "the state" is evil and that the only way that "we" can be freed from the "tyranny" of government is to reduce the size of "the state". The argument is usually expressed in defence of ideologically driven neoliberalisation strategies such as the dismantling of welfare provision or the privatisation of state assets (of the kind that may either generate a profit or be profitably asset stripped) to the supposedly virtuous corporate sector.
The first and most obvious problem with the argument is the fact that it relies on oversimplification, the facile "good vs evil" argument. There is no room for nuance in the world of right-wing propaganda. Upon any kind of examination it becomes clear that "the state is inherently bad" and "the private sector is inherently good" are false premises. There are countless examples of positive state interventions (the provision of universal education, and the prevention of child labour being two that are particularly difficult to contradict). There are even more examples of private sector immorality (the massive scale of corporate tax dodging, systematic fraud against their own customers, bribery, toxic waste dumping, executive greed at a time of "austerity", use of mandatory unpaid slave labour through Workfare, jumping out of unprofitable contracts leaving the taxpayer to foot the bill....). Anyone espousing such facile "black and white view" conceptions of government and the private sector must either be a fool or a propagandist.
For the proponent to espouse such oversimplified arguments they must be using the ignoring the facts strategy. Since the 1970s the size of the state has shrunk dramatically with huge state industries sold off to the private sector (oil, gas, coal, steel, aviation, rail, water) and state services outsourced (diverse functions of local government, school meals, forensic science, court translation, PFI scams to name but a few) yet the living standards of ordinary working people have fallen dramatically since this process began. Wages have been stagnating for decades, pensions have been repeatedly attacked, the retirement age has been increased, personal debt levels have grown enormously and most families need both parents to work in order to make ends meet. If the "evil state" is so bad, why have things been getting so much worse for ordinary working people since the neoliberals began dismantling it?
When you come across the state vs private false duality argument, you may notice that the proponent uses the strategy of cloaking in emotive language, using negative words and phrases like the "parasitic" state, the taxpayer's "burden", welfare "scroungers" the "tyranny" of the state. The emotive appeal strategy is also used when the blame the victim fallacy is invoked as "evidence" that the state is bad. A typical example of "blame the victim" would be the accusation that the state encourages people to become unemployed "welfare scroungers" by paying unemployment benefits, without any consideration of the fact that huge numbers of people are made unemployed when their supposedly virtuous private sector employers decide to increase company profitability by sacking their local workforce and replacing them with much cheaper third world labour or simply sacking everyone and asset stripping the business.
Another indicator of a fallacious argument is the tactic of speaking on behalf of the majority. This strategy relies on the casual assertion that the proponent's argument has the backing of the majority through strategic use of the words "we" and "us". Speaking on behalf of the majority is a technique closely associated with far-right extremism, the 20th Century fascist movements used it to defend their ethnic cleansing policies and the modern day far-right use it to speak out against Muslim communities. Whenever you hear anyone speaking on behalf of the majority without a great deal of reliable statistical data to back up their assertions, you should be extremely wary of their agenda.
Returning to the initial criticism of oversimplification, one of the most fundamental flaws in the state vs private duality is that the state and the private sector are intricately linked together through the private vested interests of countless politicians, the secondment of corporate staff to political parties, the lobbying industry, corporate junketing, huge state subsidies and outsourcing contracts, hundreds of billions worth of PFI scams and joint "diplomatic trade missions" to sell weapons to third world countries. Under the neoliberal political system many politicians see their time in politics simply as a stepping stone to further riches, designing policy to curry favour from corporate interests in the form of boardroom positions or lucrative "advisory roles" to supplement their bloated government pensions.
If we are to allow blatant oversimplifications, a more accurate one would be a symbiotic establishment relationship between government and the private sector, working jointly to undermine the rights and conditions of ordinary working people.
As with most right wing nonsense, the state vs private duality relies on the strategy of argument by repetition, otherwise known as the big lie technique, a strategy described by Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels as "when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it" and that "if you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it".
The state vs private duality has been repeated so often that it has become an unquestionable truism to the right wing media and the orthodox neoliberal political establishment. The casual assumption that the private sector is better than the state forms the foundation stones of countless other lame right-wing arguments, including the parasitic state argument, the golden hammer of neoliberalism, the unavoidable austerity position, the myth of private sector efficiency and the great neoliberal lie.0 -
You must enjoy your PPE course lots0
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tiredofwhiners wrote:d87francis wrote:Neoliberalism is the defining political economic paradigm of our time -
No, its a word that the Guardian readership use to blame everyone except themselves for the mess the country is in. The only papers that even use the expression are the left wing ones, looking to blame the current crisis on those who were not in power when Labour destroyed the balance of the economy.
blahblahblahblah
I know that Cake Shop isn't exactly an academic journal, but do you ever think to check your facts before posting?
Go onto the Guardian, type "debt time bomb" into the search engine. Then select any year from about 2000 onwards and read some of the stories. The Guardian published loads of articles warning about how dangerous public and private debt was becoming. At the same time, I seem to recall many right-wing ones gloating about the success of the British economy and de-regulation but are now wise after the event (unfortunately the Torygraph won't let me search that far back and the Times is behind a paywall, so I can't link to any evidence).
Both Labour and the Tories had almost identical economic policies during this period. Of the big parties, only the Liberal Democrats had the foresight to warn about the gathering storm. Go and have a look at the party manifestos from that time.0 -
For extra marks, please relate your previous answer to the effects of emerging economies on the economic and political situation in westernised nations since 1945.d87francis wrote:...Mangeur0 -
tiredofwhiners wrote:
Thatchers responsibility was to the country as a whole, not just the miners and as the miners had publicly stated it was their intent to bring down the elected government, they deserved 100% of what they got. They were not collateral damage but were the target - a self-interest group looking to keep themselves living beyond their means at the expanse of everyone else. Just the same as British Leyland but without the violence.
A bit like the housing crisis in the 80's we will live and learn through this crisis. What we will learn is that giving the government an ever increasing amount of our earned money does not give you much in return, so people will want low taxation, and unless you get an education, get a job and work hard, the state is not going to be able to keep you. If you're 18, no qualifications and a bad attitude, then there will be no job for you at all and you'll have to learn to live in poverty or go and get an education.
It's not just the miners that suffered though is it? She should have risen above it all. There was no way that the Gov't would have been brought down, apart from maybe at the polls...0 -
There is meant to be a divide.
There is meant to be rich and poor. I said earlier about this as I once spoke to an economist who told me that government need to keep people in order. This is done by rational wastage.Living MY dream.0 -
VTech wrote:There is meant to be a divide.
There is meant to be rich and poor. I said earlier about this as I once spoke to an economist who told me that government need to keep people in order. This is done by rational wastage.
I agree in general. As long as the poor are not getting poorer. I think the notion of the gap between the two getting wider is a bit of a misnomer, as long as they are both moving in the same direction. We do ok in the UK as a whole though. We all have the opportunity to "progress", if we apply a bit of graft, as that person above said.
Can I suggest to you though that what the economist told you was his/her opinion. (I also have an Economics degree and you don't listen to a word I say
). For "keep people in order", I would use "keep order". 0 -
Garry H wrote:It's not just the miners that suffered though is it? She should have risen above it all. There was no way that the Gov't would have been brought down, apart from maybe at the polls...
Tell that to Edward Heath!
(and yes, before you tell me, I know you can't as he's dead...)0 -
greasedscotsman wrote:Garry H wrote:It's not just the miners that suffered though is it? She should have risen above it all. There was no way that the Gov't would have been brought down, apart from maybe at the polls...
Tell that to Edward Heath!
(and yes, before you tell me, I know you can't as he's dead...)
Touche!
I should have said "apart from by democratic means" 0 -
I'm not sure the last sentence in that applies these days, primarily due to the cost of housing (now there's an instance of poisonous state intervention if ever there was one!).Garry H wrote:I agree in general. As long as the poor are not getting poorer. I think the notion of the gap between the two getting wider is a bit of a misnomer, as long as they are both moving in the same direction. We do ok in the UK as a whole though. We all have the opportunity to "progress", if we apply a bit of graft, as that person above said.Mangeur0 -
Garry H wrote:greasedscotsman wrote:Garry H wrote:It's not just the miners that suffered though is it? She should have risen above it all. There was no way that the Gov't would have been brought down, apart from maybe at the polls...
Tell that to Edward Heath!
(and yes, before you tell me, I know you can't as he's dead...)
Touche!
I should have said "apart from by democratic means"
Actually, I think you were OK with the first post, you did say "maybe at the polls". Anyway, not that it matters, I think what happened to Heath is what Thatcher was frightened of and explains what she did (not that I'm trying to defend it...)0 -
AchillesLeftKnee wrote:
I'm not sure the last sentence in that applies these days, primarily due to the cost of housing (now there's an instance of poisonous state intervention if ever there was one!).Garry H wrote:I agree in general. As long as the poor are not getting poorer. I think the notion of the gap between the two getting wider is a bit of a misnomer, as long as they are both moving in the same direction. We do ok in the UK as a whole though. We all have the opportunity to "progress", if we apply a bit of graft, as that person above said.
I'll give you that. I'm of an age not to be affected by it.
We should start building those cheap houses, blah, blah, JM Keynes etc, etc, etc... 0 -
Likewise, not a direct issue for me.Garry H wrote:
I'll give you that. I'm of an age not to be affected by it.AchillesLeftKnee wrote:
I'm not sure the last sentence in that applies these days, primarily due to the cost of housing (now there's an instance of poisonous state intervention if ever there was one!).Garry H wrote:I agree in general. As long as the poor are not getting poorer. I think the notion of the gap between the two getting wider is a bit of a misnomer, as long as they are both moving in the same direction. We do ok in the UK as a whole though. We all have the opportunity to "progress", if we apply a bit of graft, as that person above said.
We should start building those cheap houses, blah, blah, JM Keynes etc, etc, etc...
For what it's worth, I wasn't approaching the issue with a Keynesian hat on at all. The way I see, you've got a market in which supply is mercilessly restricted by the state via the planning system, and in which state's attitude towards funding to act in that market is "more is always better". Chuck in the effective exclusion of housing costs (generally the biggest single component of cost of living) from the inflation calculations and it strikes me as a fantastic, if terrifying, example of state intervention distorting a market in a regressive and divisive manner.Mangeur0 -
johnfinch wrote:Go onto the Guardian, type "debt time bomb" into the search engine. Then select any year from about 2000 onwards and read some of the stories. The Guardian published loads of articles warning about how dangerous public and private debt was becoming. At the same time, I seem to recall many right-wing ones gloating about the success of the British economy and de-regulation but are now wise after the event (unfortunately the Torygraph won't let me search that far back and the Times is behind a paywall, so I can't link to any evidence).
Both Labour and the Tories had almost identical economic policies during this period. Of the big parties, only the Liberal Democrats had the foresight to warn about the gathering storm. Go and have a look at the party manifestos from that time.
Yup - despite being Chancellor for a decade Brown tried to blame the Bank - with over half of its MPC members being his appointees - and the FSA - his creation - and the sub-prime mortgage crisis in America for the financial crisis. Brown would have had Alan Greenspan's babies if it had been physically possible
If anything Cameron had been advocating even lighter regulation of The City so he didn't have a leg to stand on. Vince Cable was one of the few who saw it coming and he was widely derided as a loon...
The chapters on the financial crisis in Andrew Rawnsley's excellent book 'The End of the Party' are terrifying.0 -
Garry H wrote:VTech wrote:There is meant to be a divide.
There is meant to be rich and poor. I said earlier about this as I once spoke to an economist who told me that government need to keep people in order. This is done by rational wastage.
I agree in general. As long as the poor are not getting poorer. I think the notion of the gap between the two getting wider is a bit of a misnomer, as long as they are both moving in the same direction. We do ok in the UK as a whole though. We all have the opportunity to "progress", if we apply a bit of graft, as that person above said.
Can I suggest to you though that what the economist told you was his/her opinion. (I also have an Economics degree and you don't listen to a word I say ). For "keep people in order", I would use "keep order".
Ill take that
To be honest, I dont know too much about this subject other than what I listen too, world trading is an issue for us as is exchange rates etc etc. I just remembered what this guy said several years ago and it did make sense to me, after all, can we really believe that in modern society we can lose so many billions on bad decisions through governments when in business we can follow every single penny.
When we are audited we have discrepancies questioned that are over £5 or something daft like that yet the governments seem to lose billions weekly.Living MY dream.0 -
Garry H wrote:It's not just the miners that suffered though is it? She should have risen above it all. There was no way that the Gov't would have been brought down, apart from maybe at the polls...
The previous government of Heath was brought down by the unions - I assume you're too young to realise The government resigned because it couldn't keep working because the light literally went out four days a week. thats intimidation and extortion which led to the ban on third party picketing.
When Labour got in after Heath, and the three day week, the unions demanded pay rises from the puppets they paids for and many got around 25% - at which point the economy started to collapse rather quickly as the taxpayers were paying more for stuff they didn't use, than for stuff they wanted.. Thats what killled off the economy.
You don't rise above extortion and destruction - you get down and deal with it, harshly as is needed.
Economists know sfa - they just keep guessing until something happens that accords with their guess. How many times do you hear them claim 'I predicted that' as if nobody had noticed the continually inaccurate forecasts before and after the event.0 -
dynamicbrick wrote:tiredofwhiners wrote:Rail is a tricky one because the rail infrastructure is already nationalized and when people complain that their trains are late, the overwhelming majority of the time,
Dunno what part of the country you're in (or which TOC you work for), but my local effort managed be 'on-time' (based on what they call on-time, not actually arriving when they're supposed to) less than 70% of the time in the three months to the end of 2012. Around half of those were reckoned to be due to staff shortages or train faults.
Having 1 in every 3 trains late isn't what I'd call overwhelming majority on time
London Midland? If it is then you have picked a perfect example of why privatisation hasn't worked for the railways. The staff shortages were down to the fact drivers could walk across the platform at Birmingham and join Cross Country for a £10k pay rise. It takes nearly a year to train a Train Driver so hence the shortage. Perfect example of how market forces can work against the consumer. In BR days drivers were on the same money around the country with just a few small local variations.Norfolk, who nicked all the hills?
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But if government set targets that were contracted like Singapore does I bet you a pound to a penny it would work.
It's all about making people accountable. It's the current and past forms of privatisation that has been the overwhelming issue. The government sell something off and have no thought for the little person. No accountability.
If Brown was at the helm of a company and sold off its stock (our gold) for such a low price he would be in jail for industrial espionage.Living MY dream.0 -
markos1963 wrote:dynamicbrick wrote:tiredofwhiners wrote:Rail is a tricky one because the rail infrastructure is already nationalized and when people complain that their trains are late, the overwhelming majority of the time,
Dunno what part of the country you're in (or which TOC you work for), but my local effort managed be 'on-time' (based on what they call on-time, not actually arriving when they're supposed to) less than 70% of the time in the three months to the end of 2012. Around half of those were reckoned to be due to staff shortages or train faults.
Having 1 in every 3 trains late isn't what I'd call overwhelming majority on time
London Midland? If it is then you have picked a perfect example of why privatisation hasn't worked for the railways. The staff shortages were down to the fact drivers could walk across the platform at Birmingham and join Cross Country for a £10k pay rise. It takes nearly a year to train a Train Driver so hence the shortage. Perfect example of how market forces can work against the consumer. In BR days drivers were on the same money around the country with just a few small local variations.
Well actually Southern are my local TOC (1/3 of their trains have dangerous levels of botulism present) but LM are an equally good example...
Or you could examine ECML...
Or WCML franchise farce
Or FCC with their hopeless customer satisfaction...
etc etc0 -
tiredofwhiners wrote:Garry H wrote:It's not just the miners that suffered though is it? She should have risen above it all. There was no way that the Gov't would have been brought down, apart from maybe at the polls...
The previous government of Heath was brought down by the unions - I assume you're too young to realise The government resigned because it couldn't keep working because the light literally went out four days a week. thats intimidation and extortion which led to the ban on third party picketing.
When Labour got in after Heath, and the three day week, the unions demanded pay rises from the puppets they paids for and many got around 25% - at which point the economy started to collapse rather quickly as the taxpayers were paying more for stuff they didn't use, than for stuff they wanted. Thats what killled off the economy.
You don't rise above extortion and destruction - you get down and deal with it, harshly as is needed.
Economists know sfa - they just keep guessing until something happens that accords with their guess. How many times do you hear them claim 'I predicted that' as if nobody had noticed the continually inaccurate forecasts before and after the event.
Although too young to actually have taken any note of it (I was three), I am aware of how the Heath Govt was "taken down". However, a repeat of 1974 was never going to happen. The political power of the Unions had already diminished by the early 80s. The impact of the strike on the economy was actually minor. Most homes had a supply of gas and Thatcher had already hedged against a shortage in coal by stockpiling.
Thatcher was as much a cause of the strike as she was the "crusher" of it. She could not possibly have not foreseen the result of the closures (without consultaion) of the pits and puting tens of thousands of miners out of work, in areas that had little else to offer in terms of employment. Remember that it isn't just the striking miners that suffered. She wanted this fight and she relished it, partly in revenge to what had happened to the Heath Govt.
I'm not condoning the strike or the actions of the NUM and the miners. Scargill was a c*nt but unfortunately for them, a lot of his membership worshipped him.0 -
tiredofwhiners wrote:Economists know sfa - they just keep guessing until something happens that accords with their guess.
Amen to that brother. Too much in the way of dogmatic theory in the field.
This thread is funny... anecdote... counter-anecdote... counter-counter-anecdote. All with a semi-personal/circumstantial slant. If i pretended to be an economist i'd predict this thread will only die out when all the privatisation anecdotes run out - silly right, but not unreasonable. Abstractly justifiable.
Problem with economics is somewhere along the line 'they' tried to make it a science. It's not. There is no certainty, proof or whatever you want to call it. Instead of being about numbers, economics is about people (just so happens that the best paid people in the world generally do things with numbers as part of their jobs, such is our derisory obsession with mindless data).
'People' don't even know everything about people yet. But knowledge isn't the cure. It's more a case of the more we 'know', the more we realise there are things we don't and can't ever know.
I mean look at this (i'll add an anecdote): http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB1121 ... 19,00.html
WTF. Seriously... Maybe brain-damaged people make better CEO's too? That would be a good development for the privatisation argument. Or would it?0 -
Garry H wrote:She could not possibly have not foreseen the result of the closures (without consultaion) of the pits and puting tens of thousands of miners out of work, in areas that had little else to offer in terms of employment.
I think she did know and realised that the alternative was much worse for the country as a whole. Its all very well folks saying 30 years what should have been done, but the country was near bankrupt, and we were paying folks unfeasibly large wages to produce something that nobody could afford to buy. That had to stop and stop it did.
It didn't matter which part of the country you were in - if you were a miner the chances were you were not well educated and had little chance of moving into a job straight away as the unions had killed off most of the manufacturing companies (unintentionally abetted by some truly dire public sector management appointees) so it was going to be painful whatever happened. Just because there isn't a job for someone to walk into, isn't actually a reason to keep paying them to do a job that nobody wants done.
When you're bleeding cash, you don't stop to worry about much else than stopping the bleeding as by the time you've wandered off to find where the replacement blood will come from, the patient is dead on the table.0 -
EKIMIKE wrote:tiredofwhiners wrote:Economists know sfa - they just keep guessing until something happens that accords with their guess.
Amen to that brother. Too much in the way of dogmatic theory in the field.
This thread is funny... anecdote... counter-anecdote... counter-counter-anecdote. All with a semi-personal/circumstantial slant. If i pretended to be an economist i'd predict this thread will only die out when all the privatisation anecdotes run out - silly right, but not unreasonable. Abstractly justifiable.
Problem with economics is somewhere along the line 'they' tried to make it a science. It's not. There is no certainty, proof or whatever you want to call it. Instead of being about numbers, economics is about people (just so happens that the best paid people in the world generally do things with numbers as part of their jobs, such is our derisory obsession with mindless data).
'People' don't even know everything about people yet. But knowledge isn't the cure. It's more a case of the more we 'know', the more we realise there are things we don't and can't ever know.
I mean look at this (i'll add an anecdote): http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB1121 ... 19,00.html
WTF. Seriously... Maybe brain-damaged people make better CEO's too? That would be a good development for the privatisation argument. Or would it?
I agree wholeheartedly with that, especially the bit about people and numbers. "Economists" and politicians are I think always quick to dismiss other societal implications as long as they can justify their actions with numbers, usually monetary ones.0 -
This is an extract from a Times article from about 2007 on the subject of British Leyland and the effect of Privatisation. As you'll gather its written by a certain petrolhead with a lighthearted twist but it gives people some idea of how bad nationalisation was, is and will be again if anyone is mad enough to consider it.
We’re all supposed to be weeping over the death of MG Rover. But this is not like the death of Concorde or the death of the Queen Mother. This is not the death of a national institution.
Of course it must be a very bleak time for the company’s 6,500 employees and their families as they stoically face an uncertain future. They are not to blame — they didn’t choose the management. I dare say the closure must also be worrying if you recently bought a Rover and now your warranty is null and void. But this is your fault for buying a stupid car. I have little sympathy for anyone who ignored the advice of every expert in the land and bought a 45 “because it’s British”.
There was a time when British engineering counted for something. But unfortunately this time was 1872. Today the demise of MG Rover is being blamed on a collection of businessmen, two of whom have face hair, who bought the company from BMW for a tenner and then began what looked to some like a massive asset-stripping operation.
This isn’t surprising. What is surprising is that after so many years of utter and absolute hopelessness there might have been any assets left to strip.
Let’s begin with Longbridge, which I think I’m right in saying was once the biggest car factory in the world. Certainly it’s the only factory with a dirty great main road running right through the middle of it.
In the glory days of BMC, cars were built in one part of the factory and finished in the other. Which meant the unpainted, unprotected shells had to be taken across the road no matter what the weather. As a result many had rusted away before they made it to the showroom.
Eventually a tunnel was constructed so the cars were no longer exposed to the elements. Great. But sadly the tunnel was exactly 2in too narrow for the Austin 1800, the so-called land crab, that was in production at the time.
Not that it mattered much because the paint shop in the bad old days rarely had any paint anyway. Richard Littlejohn, who covered the disputes that plagued Longbridge back in the 1970s, said he would regularly go to workers’ houses to find the bathroom was Allegro beige, the door was Marina green and the sitting room was TR7 yellow.
When the Mini came along Ford was horrified, partly at the clever design that made its efforts look old fashioned, but mostly by the extraordinarily low price. Wondering how on earth this little car could be sold so cheaply, they bought one and spent months analysing every last component. Only when the work was completed did they uncover the awful truth. Every single one was being sold at a loss.
This, of course, is the plague that besets all British inventiveness. It’s always allowed to fester by idiotic management.
We saw a similar problem when Rover and Honda teamed up to make the 800. When it finally made it into production: disaster. Customers found that the back window kept popping out. Of course this didn’t really matter because by the time the 800 came along Rover was already wearing margarine trousers on its inevitable slide into oblivion.
A slide that really began when British Leyland went bankrupt in 1975 and was nationalised.
On paper it must have seemed like a good idea, bringing together 97 different companies to form BL. But in practice the workforce and management at each plant were still fiercely proud of whatever it was they were making.
So, when Morris made the Marina, Austin came up with the Allegro, which meant BL was competing against itself. And it was the same story with Triumph. Remember the Stag? When it was being developed Triumph’s engineers had access to the Rover V8. It was light, frugal and powerful and would have been ideal. But there was no way they’d use “Rover rubbish”, so instead they nailed together two Dolomite engines to create their own V8, which overheated every time it was wet, dry, windy, cold, hot or grey. And let’s not forget BL’s styling department. Today Ford houses its design team in Soho, so that they’re in the thick of the movers’ and shakers’ action. In Italy the staff at Pininfarina and Ital are deliberately made to work in exquisite towns with Renaissance architecture and many men in sunglasses. Which brings us to the Metro. It could only have come from a town that housed the Bullring.
So, infighting, lousy design and a factory that was no more suitable for car production than a stable. And to make matters worse the company had been targeted by extremists who were determined to make sure that no car made it onto the road. In his first six months as chairman Michael Edwardes had to deal with 327 different industrial disputes.
* It’s easy to understand the motivation for all this unrest and hopelessness. It’s much more fun to stand round a brazier shouting “scab” at anyone in a tie than it is to spend all day bolting Prince of Darkness Lucas components onto a car that wouldn’t have worked anyway.
What’s more, it didn’t matter. Back then, everyone still had a sense that Britain ran the world, that Japanese cars were a joke and that the Germans were a bunch of war-losing bastards. They were all so arrogant, so far removed from the harsh reality of foreign competition, that they refused even to look at the competition.
And anyway Jim Callaghan would simply roll up the following week with another skipful of taxpayers’ cash. Over the years BL has cost the British government £3.5 billion.
This is my problem. Since I was old enough to read newspapers I’ve always perceived the British motor industry to be nothing more than a fountain of woe, waste and doom. A park full of men in donkey jackets raising their hands. A strike with a Birmingham accent.
Yes, there were flashes of inspiration. The Mini, of course, and the Rover SD1. Even the Maestro was clever; with lots of space and a light, airy feel, it was years ahead of its time. But these were pinpricks of light, no more noticeable than faint stars in the inky blackness of space.
And there seemed no end to the problem. The factories couldn’t be closed because negotiations would have to include the sheet metal workers, the metal mechanics, the draughtsmen, the technicians and half a dozen unions, including the all powerful TGWU.
On top of that, you have Harris Mann, who designed the TR7 and the Allegro, and Red Robbo, who refused to make either. You have Lord Stokes, who was an invertebrate, and Edwardes, who’s much too small. Then there’s Graham Day, Mrs Thatcher, Jim Callaghan, me, apparently, Tony Benn, Honda, BMW, the Shanghai Automotive group and British Aerospace who, in 1988, took the company off the government’s hands, promising they wouldn’t sell it for five years.
Five years later almost to the day, and having invested virtually nothing, they sold it to BMW for £800m. And what did BMW do? Why, they launched the wilfully old-fashioned 75, proving that they had no idea either. Nobody did. Nobody ever has done. Never in the field of human endeavour has so much been done, so badly, by so many.
And then we ended up with the Phoenix Four, who cannot possibly have dreamt even for a femtosecond that they had any chance whatsoever of turning the company around. They needed at least four all-new cars, each one of which would have to be at least as good as a Volkswagen.
And in these days of emission legislation and crash protection requirements, a new Volkswagen costs around £1 billion to design and develop. I’m told Renault recently spent £25m on a new heating and ventilation system.
On that basis the Phoenix Four didn’t even have enough for a new door knob. They must have known that. They must. And they must also have known that no car firm in the world would want to get into bed with them. Not with all that face hair going on.
Even so some people are saying the demise of MG Rover is my fault because I failed to give the cars a good review and sneered at the men in hats who drove them. I can’t understand this reasoning; am I supposed to recommend all cars that are made here irrespective of their price, performance or quality? Because if I am, all of you must go out tomorrow and buy a London cab.
Even if I thought for a moment that anyone paid any attention to anything I say — and I have figures to prove they don’t — I’m sorry, I’m not employed to think one thing and say something else.
I didn’t like the vast majority of Rover’s cars when they were being made and I won’t miss them at all. What’s more, I cannot even get teary and emotional about the demise of the company itself — though I do feel sorry for the workforce. In fact when I heard the news my first thought was “good”. Now we can move on and do something we’re good at, like . . . actually, I can’t think what we’re good at. But it definitely isn ’t running car firms.
Think about it. The four coolest cars in the world are the Aston DB9, the Rolls-Royce Phantom, the Mini and the Range Rover. British ingenuity. Foreign investment. Foreign management.
There is, however, one big problem with the collapse. Road safety. I really do think that with no more Rovers we will see a dramatic increase in the number of crashes.
You see, in the 1960s and 1970s all the bad drivers who had no interest in cars had Volvos. We knew to beware; just because a Volvo was in the left-hand lane, indicating left, didn’t mean it was going to turn left.
Then Volvo went all sporty, forcing the weak and the feeble to look elsewhere. Most ended up in Rovers, dithering about at junctions and generally driving the wrong way down motorways. There’s one Rover that has been stationary at the complicated double mini- roundabout in Chipping Norton for 15 years, its driver paralysed with fear.
Now, with Rover gone, I’m worried because there’ll be no advance warning of a bad driver ahead. They could all be camouflaged in Fords or BMWs. And you’ll have no idea until the moment of impact.
I do think that in the fullness of time they’ll all end up in Hyundais and Kias — hopeless, uninspiring, witless, soulless, gutless, characterless white goods from the Pacific Rim. I’m sure they’ll feel right at home.0 -
Don't you mean "how bad nationalisation was"?0
