Good Post. I enjoyed it.

A report a couple weeks ago by the World Bank, "Crisis and Protection in the Automotive Industry," examines the reactions of national policy makers to the great auto recession. The report contends that emerging companies (from India and China) will eventually need to assemble where they sell. Yet, and picking up on one of your points, when these firms replace domestic firms, the vehicle and technological development (and R&D and engineering jobs) will be lost and take place outside the domestic country.

Thus, even if the worse of "lift and shift" is avoided, or is eventually replaced with domestic assembly, the damage done is surely substantial. The report suggests that one view of many of the policy actions by various governments has been to protect the higher value added parts of the production chain. No such luck for LDV
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http://www-wds.worldbank.org/servlet/WDSContentServer/WDSP/IB/2009/09/21/000158349_20090921125716/Rendered/PDF/WPS5060.pdf

So, LDV (like other key assets of Birmingham industry) passes with only a whimper. It's a symptom of something much deeper.

Why can't the British have pride in what they gave the world - manufacturing industry?

As you point out, other countries would not countenence the passing of key industrial assets and local industrial culture. Here it is sacrificed to the altar of short-termist, right-wing market dogma.

Regretfully this has been the feature of the industrial strategy (if one has existed at all) of successive governments of all political hues for the past 30 years.

Elsewhere, they take a wider and longer view of the importance of the nurturing of and investing in making things; especially making things in an area, a locale, and becoming a part of that local culture and adding real value to the product as well as its town or city and its region.

It seems to me that we were all once proud and locally supportive of our key local industries, whether in Somerset or Inverness, Cardiff, Belfast or Birmingham. Yes, we have to renew them and refashion them, especially in an environmental context which is now part of the bottom line.

Instead, we allow economic cycles simply to come and go and lay waste sometimes completely randomly to our industrial and commercial heritage in a way that no other country does. And you can't get this back these days. Again, the market fundamentalists have a warped Darwinian approach to recessions in particular and see them as good for business, sees them as renewing and cleansing. It's economic and industrial madness.

I think we have an education system and routes into political and financial power which do not value manufacturing and industry and making things. Those who could make the decisions simply don't understand and could never actually appreciate its importance. It's something 'others' do. Culture is evening tickets to Covent Garden and not the very weft and weave of local craft and industry.

We should have an industry czar appointed (Professor Bailey would fit the bill) whose job it is to ensure that the long-term support of manufacturing industry is put at the heart of economic decision-making and investment. The czar would also ensure that we have administration and liquidation processes which enable survival of the important and ultimately sustainable (in every sense of the word) key industrial assets and looked at across a region in a strategic way, and not what we have now: taxi-rank style, next up, random business deaths.

The French, the Spanish, the Germans and the Italians act differently in a way fundamentally different to us in these matters. And they are right to do so.

Thanks for the feedback. MKE, the World Bank report is most interesting. Johnl yes we do need to put an industrial policy centre stage and one which supports manufacturing. Without us rebalancing the economy so that we make more 'stuff' and spend and borrow less, we risk repeating the bubble all over again. Such an apporach could also support well-paid, decent jobs, of the sort that MG Rover and LDV supported. Our work on the MG Rove workers showed how much less they were earning 3 years on.

I appreciate that 'green' vehicle technology is both sexier as a subject, and more relevant to the future regional economy, but let's not forget Manganese Bronze, and its black cabs. How long will production, as opposed to screwdriver assembly, last at its Coventry factory, given that sales continue to fall? Whatever problems their supply chain with Geely has encountered to date, it must make commercial sense to ship as many components in from China as possible, expecially given the reported quality issues with British-built cabs coming out of Cov.

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