How Tea And Biscuits Killed The British Car Industry!

the mini the E-Type the Land Rover Bentley Rolls Royce Aston Martin just where did it all go so badly wrong for the British car industry hello everybody Welcome to number 27 I'm Jack now we all know the old fables about the unions poor management and poor quality but I think there's a little bit more to it than that or at least there are some reasons why Britain got into that situation in the first place steady yourselves because this explanation includes the second world war Britain's colonies and some chimps drinking tea time with its gleaming silver and tingling teacups water happy time it is to the last delicious drop now just bear with me I promise you that that clip will make more sense later on in the video in the meantime let's take a very brief historical look at the rise and full of the British car industry between 1932 and 1955 Britain was the second largest producer of cars in the world behind only the United States in 1936 It produced almost 400 000 Vehicles a year by comparison Germany was well behind on 250 000 France a hundred thousand and Italy only 50 000. by 1950 it was a vehicle exporting Juggernaut it was the largest exporter of cars in the world and in the 1960s it had over a million people in the UK working on producing cars British Leyland alone employed more than two hundred thousand today sadly there are no british-owned car producers still in existence we all know we all know what happened to the main manufacturers the likes of Bentley Rover Rolls-Royce Aston Martin I did think hold on a minute we may not have any major producers left but there is definitely McLaren Caterham and Morgan I was completely wrong in that McLaren is actually owned by Bahrain Caterham again I was convinced was British owned is now owned by the Japanese and lastly Morgan out of all the companies is owned by an Italian Consortium now the question is just how and why did we get to this situation let's first look at how this happened and this is where our friends the tea drinking chimps come back into the picture it is said that the industry was killed by tea and biscuits why is that it's because the British worker supposedly was very lazy very inefficient and spent most of his time on tea breaks having tea and biscuits I'm sure there is some truth to that but that's definitely not the whole story we have to admit though that those strikes from the 50s in the 60s culminating in the 70s badly hobbled the industry the main manufacturers like Austin and Morris all the manufacturers but those were the two main ones were really struggling this is where the British government stepped in and helped to arrange a merger that led to the Behemoth that was British Leyland now this was supposed to concentrate Britain's forces in one maker it would lead to savings and it would mean that instead of having all these sort of medium-sized manufacturers dotted around there would be one major conglomerate that could take on the likes of fear Volkswagen and Ford things definitely didn't work out British Leyland continued to lose money not just that but it lost its prime position as the biggest seller of vehicles in the UK to Ford as a result the government stepped in 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 a great deal more [Music] the nationalization was absolutely disastrous not only did it not increase efficiencies but the company the motor industry in general was used by the British government in order to implement economic policy they provided grants for employment and they forced the manufacturers to set up factories in deprived areas we're going to talk a little bit more about this later on in the video but this all meant that by the mid-1980s the British government had spent over 2 billion pounds propping up British Leyland and it was absolutely fed up to the gills and decided The Only Way Forward was privatization so British Leyland was eventually sold to British Aerospace that was in 1988 and it looked like a way of at least keeping it in British hand however British Aerospace didn't have that much success or that much luck and six years later in 2004 they sold it to BMW the sale of Rover the last british-owned volume car manufacturer to BMW by its parent company British Aerospace took businessmen and stock markets totally by surprise BMW initially looked like they were very committed to the brands especially mini Land Rover and Rover they did put in a lot of new investment but they soon saw as well that it was a very difficult company to get to grips with so BMW decided to keep the bits that it wanted I.E really mini which became not much more than a branding exercise and the factory in Cowley and the other bits were sold on Rover went to a British Consortium in 2000. but that only lasted five years before it went bankrupt what was left the factories the designs were bought by Chinese companies Bentley Rolls-Royce went to the Germans to again BMW and Volkswagen and jaguar Land Rover after a stink with Ford ended up with Tata in India so the British car industry was pretty much non-existent but the interesting thing is why did we get here we are going to talk about mismanagement and the unions in a bit more depth but before that I want to talk about one factor that most people haven't really considered and that is the effect of the war and of Britain's colonies on their native car industry what do I mean by that well for most countries the wall was pretty devastating the second world war for Germany and for Italy for example it ended up pretty much destroying the factories that they had and the industry that was there Britain therefore had a huge Advantage after the second world war because all its production facilities were already there that meant that they were absolutely brilliantly priced for the expansion which took place with England in the 1960s being the biggest exporter of cars worldwide but there is a huge downside to all this as well the fact that Britain inherited all its infrastructure pretty much intact made the industry a little bit complacent so that meant that they didn't really have to try as hard they weren't as driven those labor issues that started up in the 50s for example instead of dealing with them at that point in time they let them Fester because the industry was still doing relatively well production facilities as well because they were already there they were inherited there wasn't really that much incentive to make them more efficient the other countries were hobbled by this but it meant that when they restarted their factories restarted their Industries they had made them much more efficient as a brand new industry the Brits were stuck with outdated production methods and that really hurt them now the effect of this was compounded by what happened with British colonies so after the second world war Britain also had a captive market and sold cars very easily to countries like Australia like South Africa so again removing the impetus for them to try and improve the industry they were kind of doing all right as it was now James May famously said that it was the countries that lost the second world war that made the best cars and I could kind of see where he's coming from with Germany I suppose and Japan his point was that these countries didn't need to invest in their armies in defense therefore they invested in their economies and they started making some fantastic cars it's a bit of an odd Point really because if you look at Italy for example it also lost the war and it has made some fantastic cars but I wouldn't hold up the Italian car industry especially at the moment as a Shining Light of success I think his point though is valid it is also the countries that lost the war that started making the best cars but it's not because they didn't have to invest in their Armed Forces it was simply because their car industry started from scratch their production methods were better and they were much hungrier for Success so they had to make better cars in order to be able to sell them now another point that has been made is that the British manufacturers found it very difficult to get funds from the British banks for research and development whereas for example in Japan the makers were able to borrow money quite cheaply work on razor thin margins and just invest for the future now there may be some truth to this but I think that when you consider that the British government invested over 2 billion in British Leyland between 1975 and 85. I think that investment to me anyway doesn't really seem like it was the main issue so we're back now to the unions or the workforce and the management so is the British worker to blame were they really that inefficient was it all about tea and biscuits and no work well this is where something quite interesting comes in and this is a story about smelly cats so I just wanted to grab 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 laid idle for over two days because of 21 workers in the trim shop in the Triumph Factory in speak in Liverpool now what happened is that the trim shop workers these 21 workers complained that the Trim Shop was badly kept smelly there were stray cats so it was a health hazard without a doubt British Factories at the time had incredibly LAX health and safety standards so I don't doubt that this actually happened but they negotiated with management to get the Trim Shop completely cleaned so that was going to take 45 minutes and the shop workers got management to agree that during those 45 minutes they would still be paid while they were waiting for the Trim Shop to be cleaned so that's all good so the Trim Shop was cleaned but when they came back to work they said that 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 that they were going to have should also be paid so they should be paid for having it management said no if you want to go and have a meeting about this now you can have the meeting but it will come out of you it'll be docked from your pay as a result of this the 21 workers from the Trim Shop voted to strike not because of the original issue not because of the cat smell not because of the health and safety but because the management weren't willing to pay them to have their second meeting this meant that the 600 other workers at the factory were also laid idle for two days until this problem was resolved so I think this gives you an idea of what was going on at the time in Clarkson's car years he makes some really interesting points about all this and he essentially in a very funny clarksonian way he basically points out that all the different manufacturers and parts of British Leyland that had been cobbled together worked completely dysfunctionally often in competition with each other and that is something that I would really agree with so often one company will withhold sort of technical information technical know-how or parts from an other part of the business but he also says that one of the biggest mistakes that they made at that 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 thought of as a bit of a problem but I have to say that I think this is a bit of a red herring because internal competition certainly seems to have not caused any problems whatsoever for Volkswagen so if you look at Volkswagen if you look at Sayer skoda VW Audi all the group cars are pretty much the same things they're built on the same platform they all look pretty similar there are some differences in quality of Tim in trim sorry and design but overall if you're talking about internal competition I'm pretty sure that wasn't what killed off British Leyland it was more to do with problems with the workforce and inefficiencies but also with mismanagement an upper management team that were merely obsessed with cutting costs and margins for profit instead of producing a good product but even more interestingly the mismanagement came from even higher it came from the government that owned the company because they were using it as part of their economic plan it meant that factories were often placed in the wrong places there's also an experience of that in Italy with the tragic sort 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 wasn't used to producing cars as a result they rusted terribly so in Britain something similar happened an example of this is the factory for the Hillman Imp which was located in Scotland against the wishes and the advice of the company itself because it didn't make sense there was no captive Workforce the parts weren't there so once again a car which was a nice little design and could have been really successful was stymied by poor decision making what are the points that is frequently made to bolster the idea that it was upper management that was the problem rather than the 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 like Honda and Nissan and those factories that they started up here were hugely successful they produced very good cars very good quality and very efficiently so the British workers clearly could be made to work very very well but I have to say I think there is a problem with this argument the problem is that in the 90s the British Workforce was completely different way less militant to the workforce that we had in the 70s without doubt the Japanese attitude to production to solving problems is more Progressive and works better but I also think they were largely helped by the fact that people were no longer as militant as they were in the 70s now let's take this opportunity to talk a little bit about the future of production in the UK we may no longer own any of our vehicle producers but at least we could be happy that Britain by 2016 was back producing 1.8 million Vehicles so as a vehicle producer it was doing pretty well unfortunately in the last few years things haven't gone so well by 2019 Britain had its worst ever year 1.3 million Vehicles produced and 2021 is looking to be even worse than that why is that well some people will bring up brexit as a possibility that might be the case I don't know the thing is though Honda has just shut its plant here and whatever the reason I think that we are facing another turbulent period so what do you think were the real reasons for the collapse of the British car industry I do think that what happened after the second world war during the war to British infrastructure the fact that the makers got away with it pretty much scot-free played a big part in how the industry developed in the future there is definitely also an issue with the unions with upper management but I think a lot of that stems from that complacency that they had from inheriting an industry that was pretty much intact and wasn't forced to compete very much in the coming years let me know what you think thank you all so much for watching I hugely appreciate it please do subscribe if you haven't already and I really look forward to seeing you for the next video

Channel: Number 27

Views: 399,519

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Id: l7qKebPKMJQ

Length: 18min 40sec (1120 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 14 2022