Dismantling Longbridge
WORKERS, DEC 2005 ISSUE
What future for Rover's Longbridge plant and the 5,000 workers who have been made redundant? The Chinese owners, Nanjing Automobile, press on with drip feed press releases, all indicating positive plans, but practice and action speak louder. The production of 100,000 cars a year and employment of 1,200 workers is proposed for Longbridge by 2010, but only if finance can be raised in the USA. The proposal is deemed "completely unrealistic" by competitors in the auto industry, especially Chinese competitors. Any new joint venture to re-establish Rover seems as distant as the joint ventures the Phoenix Four claimed were in the pipeline.
200 Longbridge staff have been offered short-term re-employment by Nanjing – in China. Their job? To dismantle Longbridge and re-assemble it in China. This rather indicates that the Longbridge site is being asset-stripped and cleared.
The Nanjing Automobile Vice President has released correspondence to the TGWU National Secretary for the car industry, quoting Department of Trade and Industry officials. The correspondence is illuminating:
"The DTI went to great lengths to point out the overcapacity of car manufacturing in Europe...The information given by the DTI left us the impression that they believed we should choose to give up our plan of both investment in the UK and recommencement of production at Longbridge...The DTI are not able to offer grant aid other than minimal routinely available training and capital investment subsidies...The DTI also explained that unlike other countries around the world the UK has no strategy for the automotive industry and relied totally on the dynamics of the free market." The government and European Union's strategy for disposing of Rover is thus epitomised in one paragraph from the DTI.
Shortly the DTI investigation into alleged fraud and financial malpractice by the Phoenix Four directors will be published. The "Phoenix" which was supposed to rise from the ashes of Rover with the famous £10 cheque paid to BMW, has crashed with company debts of over £1 billion. The four directors are still multi-millionaires and sound betting is that the DTI investigation will exonerate them of all allegations.
If there ever is any future Rover production it will be in China. Longbridge has been buried by the Blair government.