CAR CRASH

Derek’s old Rover gets a wash and brush up at a charity car clean.

In all the years I have been a member of the Campaign for an Independent Britain (CIB), it has only once held its AGM and main meeting of the year outside London. The reason it moved away from the centre of the universe that one years was down to one of the members, a long standing trade unionist, who put in a motion at the previous AGM to go to Birmingham the following year – that was when Sod and his infamous law kicked in.

Plans for these events have to be put in place well in advance, and the trouble is, sometimes events can happen rapidly to screw up all your best laid plans, as they did with this CIB AGM.

This was the year when BMW decided it was going to close down the manufacture of Rover cars at Longbridge as it was not making money. There was an almighty stink at the time and a major march and rally in Birmingham to save Rover was organised for, you guessed it, the very same Saturday that the CIB was to hold its AGM in the city.

Come the day all the trade unionists were on the march and rally to save Rover, including the chap who had pushed for the CIB AGM to be in Birmingham. Poor old CIB had some press coverage for being in the city, but of course, all the news was of Rover and that rally.

So why did BMW, after buying and investing in Rover, decide to pull the plug? Apart from using the feeble excuse at the time that it was down to Britain not joining the euro, the real reason was that BMW wanted the British Government to give it state aid to help save Rover and the jobs there. But of course, the EU Competition Commissioner said hang on a bit chaps, I want to have a think about this and will make my decision in a few months as all this goes against the EU rules on competition. The British Government, being obedient little toady servants to the great master EU, told BMW it could not give it a hand out more than the maximum allowed, BMW in turn had a strop, said bugger you, and in the end flogged Rover off for a couple of quid the now infamous Phoenix. And by and by Rover was still closed, and the Chinese, laughing their little yellow socks off, plundered and asset stripped and shipped the whole Rover production line off to China.

For someone such as myself who since passing his driving test in 1965, has driven a whole string of British made cars which have been three Morris’s, four Triumph’s, Two Leylands, one Jensen and in more recent time Rover’s, never once owning a foreign car, seeing our British car manufactoring going belly up is a disaster.

Now things are looking distinctly dodge for Jaguar and Land Rover whose new owners, the Indian based company Tata, have been making demands that the Government should bail out Jaguar and Land Rover as it did with the banks.

It too wants money but has given the Government a reprieve as the Tata boss, Ratan Tata, has promised to pump a sizeable amount of Tata’s own money in to help see Jaguar and Land Rover through, but like Arnie, they may be coming back, and when they do what will our Government do then? They will have to go crawling to the EU and plead permission to give British taxpayers money to a British based company to save British jobs, and if the EU says no, then Jaguar and Land Rover could either be closed or its production line and jobs, in a repeat of Rover, depart for foreign climes.

As a child born in the slums of Birmingham I remember sitting on my dads lap listening intently to proud tales of how Birmingham was the workshop of the world, how has Britain and our great manufacturing base been reduced to this within my lifetime?