How Tea And Biscuits Killed The British Car Industry!

the mini the E-Type the Land Rover Bentley Rolls Royce Aston Martin where did it all go so wrong for the British car

industry

? Hello everyone. Welcome to number 27. I'm Jack. By now we all know the old fables about union mismanagement. and poor quality, but I think there is more to it than that or at least there are some reasons why Britain got into that situation in the first place. Relax, because this explanation includes the Second World War, the British colonies, and some chimpanzees drinking tea. With its gleaming silver and tingling teacups, happy time is every last drop delicious, now just be patient.

I promise that clip will make more sense later in the video, in the meantime, let's take a very brief historical look at the rise. and filled with the British automobile

industry

between 1932 and 1955 Britain was the second largest automobile producer in the world, behind only the United States in 1936. It produced almost 400,000 vehicles a year in comparison. Germany was far behind with 250,000 and France with one hundred thousand. and Italy only 50,000. by 1950 it was a Juggernaut vehicle exporter, it was the largest car exporter in the world and by the 1960s it had over a million people in the UK working in car production.

British Leyland alone employed more than two hundred thousand. Today, unfortunately, there are still no British-owned car producers. We all know, we all know what happened to the major manufacturers, like Bentley Rover, Rolls-Royce, Aston Martin. I thought wait a minute, we may not have any major producers left. but there are definitely McLaren Caterham and Morgan. I was completely wrong to say that McLaren is actually owned by Bahrain Caterham again. I was convinced that British ownership is now owned by the Japanese and lastly, Morgan of all companies is owned by an Italian consortium which is now the The question is how and why we got into this situation.

Let's first see how it happened and this is where our friends the tea drinking chimpanzees appear again. It is said that the industry was

killed

by tea and

biscuits

. Because? because the British worker was supposedly very lazy, very inefficient and spent most of his time on tea breaks drinking tea and

biscuits

. I'm sure there's some truth to that, but that's definitely not the whole story, although we have to admit that those strikes in the 50s, 60s and 70s severely hampered the industry, the major manufacturers, like Austin and Morris, all the manufacturers, but those were the main two, were really struggling.

This is where the British government stepped in and helped arrange a merger which led to the The giant that was British Leyland was now supposed to concentrate British forces on a single manufacturer, generate savings and mean that instead of having all these types of manufacturers midsizes spread everywhere, there would be a major conglomerate that could take on the For fear, the Volkswagen and Ford things definitely didn't work out. British Leyland continued to lose money and not only that, it lost its privileged position as the largest vehicle seller in the United Kingdom to Ford. As a result, the government intervened and was forced to nationalize the company the new Rover 3500 South Leyland Karsten mg Triumph mini Jaguar Damon princess Morris Rover all with supercover great cars and much more the nationalization was absolutely disastrous not only did it not increase efficiencies but the company was used to the wider motor industry by the British government to implement economic policy, they provided employment subsidies and forced manufacturers to set up factories in deprived areas.

We'll talk a bit more about this later in the video, but all this meant that by the mid-1980s, the British government had spent over £2 billion propping up British Leyland and was absolutely fed up and decided that the only way forward was privatization, so British Leyland was eventually sold to British Aerospace in 1988 and it seemed like a way to at least keep it in British hands, however British Aerospace was not as successful or as lucky and six years then in 2004 they sold it to BMW, selling Rover, the last British-owned carmaker, to BMW. by its parent company, British Aerospace, took business owners and stock markets completely by surprise.

At first, BMW seemed to be very committed to the brands, especially the mini Land Rover and Rover; They made a lot of new investments, but they also soon realized that it was a very difficult company to manage, so BMW decided to keep the parts it wanted, i.e. really mini, which became little more than a branding exercise and the factory in Cowley and the other parts that were sold at Rover went to a British consortium in 2000. but that only lasted five years before what was left of the factories went bankrupt the designs were bought by Chinese companies Bentley Rolls-Royce passed the Germans to return to BMW and Volkswagen and Jaguar Land Rover after a scandal with Ford ended Tata in.

In India, the British car industry was practically non-existent, but the interesting thing is why we got here. We're going to talk a little more in depth about mismanagement and unions, but before that I want to talk about a factor that most people haven't really considered and that is the effect of the war and the British colonies on its native automobile industry. what do I want to say with that? Well, for most countries the wall was pretty devastating. The Second World War for Germany and Italy, for example, ended. They practically destroyed the factories they had and the industry that was there.

Britain therefore had a huge advantage after World War II because all of their production facilities were already there, which meant they were absolutely brilliantly priced for the expansion that took place with England. In the 1960s it was the world's largest car exporter, but all this also has a big downside: the fact that Britain inherited its entire infrastructure virtually intact made the industry a bit complacent, which meant it didn't really they had to do it. As much as they tried, they were not as motivated by those labor problems that started in the 50s, for example, instead of addressing them at that time, they let them get worse because the industry was still doing relatively well and the production facilities were also doing so because already there were inherited, there really wasn't much incentive to make them more efficient, the other countries were hampered by this, but it meant that when they restarted their factories they restarted their industries, they had made them much more efficient as a whole new industry, the British.

They were stuck with outdated production methods and it really hurt them. Now the effect of this was compounded by what happened to the British colonies, so after World War II Britain also had a captive market and sold cars very easily to countries like Australia and South Africa. Taking away their impetus to try to improve the industry they were doing well as it was now. James May famously said that it was the countries that lost World War II that made the best cars and I could see where that is. Coming from Germany, I guess, and Japan, their point was that these countries didn't need to invest in their militaries for defense, therefore, they invested in their economies and started making some fantastic cars, it's a bit of a strange point, because if We look at Italy, for example, also lost the war and has made some fantastic cars, but I wouldn't consider the Italian car industry, especially at the moment, to be a shining light of success.

I think your point, although it is valid, so are the countries that lost the war that started making the best cars, but it is not because they did not have to invest in their Armed Forces, it was simply because their automotive industry started from scratch, their Production methods were better and they were much more hungry for success, so they had to do it. make better cars so you can sell them now. Another point that has been made is that British manufacturers found it very difficult to obtain funds from British banks for research and development, whereas, for example, in Japan manufacturers were able to borrow money. working at a fairly low price with very slim margins and simply investing for the future now there may be some truth to this but I think when you consider that the British government invested over 2 billion in British Leyland between 1975 and 1985.

I think that investment for me Anyway, it doesn't seem like it was the main problem, so now we go back to the unions or the workforce and management. So is the British worker to blame? If they really were that inefficient, it was all tea and biscuits and no work. This is where something quite interesting comes in and this is a story about smelly cats so I just wanted to capture a microcosm of what was going on in these factories so this is basically the cat's mouth dispute. This is a situation where 600 workers were left without a job. for over two days because 21 workers at Triumph Factory trim shop spoke out in Liverpool, now what happened is that trim shop workers, these 21 workers complained that trim shop was poorly maintained and It smelled bad, there were stray cats, so it was a health problem.

Without a doubt, British factories at the time had incredibly LAX health and safety standards, so I don't doubt this really happened, but they negotiated with management to completely clear the workshop of offcuts, which would take 45 minutes and the workers They got management to agree that for those 45 minutes they would still be paid while they waited for the Trim Shop to be cleaned, so everything was fine, so the Trim Shop was cleaned, but when they returned to work they said the The floors were wet and therefore dangerous to work on and they wanted to have a meeting to discuss the situation.

They also told management that this meeting they were going to have should also be paid for, so they should be paid to have it. Management said no if you want to go and have a meeting about this you can now have the meeting but it will leave you will be deducted from your pay as a result of this the 21 Trim Shop workers voted to strike not because of the problem original not because of the cat smell was not due to health and safety, but because management was not willing to pay them to hold their second meeting, which meant that the other 600 factory workers were also idled for two days until the problem was resolved, so I think this gives you an idea of ​​what was going on at that time in the Clarkson car years.

He makes some really interesting points about all this and essentially, in a very funny Clarksonian way, basically points out that all the different manufacturers and parts of British Leyland that had been cobbled together were operating in a completely dysfunctional way, they were often in competition with each other and that's something I would actually agree with, as often a company will withhold some sort of technical information, know-how or parts of another part of the business, but also say that one of the biggest mistakes they made at the time was that there was a lot of internal competition, so for example they had the Allegro competing against the princess.

I can see why at the time that might have been considered a bit of a problem, but I have to say that I think this is a red herring because internal competition certainly doesn't seem to have caused Volkswagen any problems, so if you look to Volkswagen, if you look at Sayer, Skoda, VW, Audi, all the cars in the group. They're pretty much the same, they're built on the same platform, they all look pretty similar, there are some differences in Tim's quality in the finish, sorry, and in the design, but overall, if you're talking about internal competition, I'm pretty sure that it was like that.

What

killed

British Leyland had more to do with workforce issues and inefficiencies, but also poor management, a senior management team that was simply obsessed with cutting costs and margins to make a profit rather than producing a good product. , but what is even more interesting, was the mismanagement. even from the top it came from the government that owned the company because they used it as part of their economic plan, which meant that the factories were often located in the wrong places; There is also an experience of that in Italy with the tragic type of production of the alpha sood, a brilliant car produced in the wrong place or at least in the wrong way with a workforce that was not used to producing cars, as a result, it was They rusted terribly, so something similar happened in Britain.An example of this is the Hillman factory.

Imp that was located in Scotland against the company's own wishes and advice because it didn't make sense that there wasn't a captive workforce, the parts weren't there, so once again a car that had a nice little design And could success really have been hampered by poor decision making? What are the points frequently raised to reinforce the idea that the problem was senior management and not workers? is that from the early 90s onwards there was a huge amount of inward investment in car production in the UK mainly from Japanese producers such as Honda and Nissan and the factories that opened here were very successful, they produced very good cars, very good quality and very efficiently, so clearly the British workers could have been made to work very, very well, but I have to do it.

I think there is a problem with this argument. The problem is that in the 90s the British workforce was completely different and less militant compared to the workforce we had in the 70s. Without a doubt, the Japanese attitude towards production and problem solving is more progressive and works . better, but I also think they were greatly helped by the fact that people were no longer as militant as they were in the 70s. Let's take this opportunity to talk a little about the future of production in the UK, it's possible that we no longer possess any of them. our vehicle producers, but at least we could be happy that Britain in 2016 was again producing 1.8 million vehicles, so as a vehicle producer it did quite well, unfortunately in recent years things have not gone well So good in 2019, Britain had the worst year in its history: 1.3 million vehicles produced and 2021 looks to be even worse than that, why?

Well, some people will mention Brexit as a possibility, that could be the case. I don't know, the thing is that Honda just closed its plant here and whatever the reason, I think we are facing another turbulent period, so what do you think it was? the real reasons for the collapse of the British car industry I think what happened after the Second World War during the war on British infrastructure and the fact that the manufacturers got away with it with virtually no consequences played a big role in how in which the industry develops in the future, there is definitely a problem with senior management unions as well, but I think a lot of that is due to the complacency they had in inheriting an industry that was largely intact and not required to compete a lot in the market.

Next few years let me know what you think. Thank you all so much for watching. I appreciate it greatly. Please subscribe if you haven't already and I really hope to see you in the next video.