UK Space Agency: 2000 satellite launches by 2030

(Chris H) Stephen – You premise your anger on a falsehood and then project a flawed critique. No one ‘closed down’ any British rail factory at all let alone to somehow give them to foreigners. Most were all nationalised in 1948 and they were private companies before that (The Big Four). Some remained independent (English Electric, Brush, Westinghouse etc) and they still exist in one form or another today

When the industry was re-privatised each division was sold off. The train manufacturing companies were mostly bought by their management teams backed by Hedge funds and other investors. The ex BREL factory in Derby was bought by ABB, then ASEA and then Bombardier. Its called capitalism and a free market economy. British investors had as much chance as Swedish or Canadian. Go shout at them not the people who are investing £ Bns in UK manufacturing and employing 10s of thousands of workers in the process.

I am all for British engineering, design and investment and especially when taxpayers money is being used (as in FSS ships) but no taxpayer’s money is involved here. So if a privately owned company wishes to invest its own money in a train and chooses a Japanese owned company thats fine by me. If UK managers were so bloody stupid they managed great British companies into bankruptcy then don’t blame foreign owned companies when they buy the scraps.

Not sure quite where Sir Nigel Gresley has any relevance here at all. Don’t forget the great British railway companies were destroyed as much by the Labour party in ’48 as by WWII. And when you look at the useless piles of crap British Rail produced after it finished with steam tells me we had somehow lost the plot in heavy engineering design and manufacture. Name me ONE UK built diesel engine that worked as designed and then kept working. We have built ONE successful train since ‘Modernisation’ – The HST. if our capabilities under British Rail were so great why has the freight sector bought over 400 US manufactured Class 59, 66, 67 and 70 and then went to Spain for Class 68 and 88? And don’t even get me started on the Nightstar debacle …

Chris, we built more than just one successful train after modernization, Deltics, 125s, 225s, etc.

Do you not find it slightly suspicious that British heavy industry (mining, steel making, ship building, car making, train making, etc.) all more or less “just happened” to disappear at exactly the same time? In reality a decision was made decades ago at the highest levels behind closed doors to destroy Britain’s heavy industry.

I agree with all of this apart from one tiny thing; everybody made crap cars in the 70s! British cars were crap. American cars were crap. French cars, um, crap. Italian cars, um, stylish crap. VW’s weren’t that great either. I think only Sweden made nice cars at that time. The German car industry back then was a different beast. Both VW and BMW had very small ranges compared with what they have today; back in the 60s British makes had lots of models and lots of badge engineering to confuse the marketing. I do wonder what would have happened if there were just Austins and fewer models. VW and BMW only started to expand their ranges in the 80s just as the wheels fell off Austin Rover; the brand was too tainted by then and Brits being more ‘free market’ minded than Germans, French, or Italians voted with their wallets. Continentals would buy anything their national brands would make we didn’t. So as the technology and materials improved through the 80s those foreign brands who made crap cars just as crappily as UK makers did were still extant. Why are roads are full of VAG products today I don’t know, could it be the mysterious machinations of the EU? I do wonder whether BMW buying Rover off BAE was more about them doing a hatchet job; I do wonder why BMW couldn’t have made a success out of Rover if VAG did the same for SEAT and Skoda. I know why we buy Japanese because Japanese brands were one of the alternatives we looked to when Austin Rover were building crap and the Japanese brands haven’t let us down. As an aside we now buy more Korean cars than we buy FIAT’s, we Brits aren’t very brand loyal. But everybody built crap cars in the 70s. 🙂

Mm I’m not sure I entirely agree with that statement David.

The Golf MK1 was released in 74! when it hit Britain we couldn’t get enough of it, it’s still VW’s best selling car to this day.

BMW released the 3, 5 and 7 series in the 70’s along with the first M sport. Those lines are still going strong today.

And of course we know how well the Japanese did, the Datson in the early 70’s.

I’m not sure about French and Italian cars, what I think is the Germans and Japanese absolutely smashed it in the late 60’s/70’s with innovative cutting edge designs and they haven’t looked back since.

There was a documentary on BBC couple of years ago with James May, it was a three parter about the British motor industry and it was fascinating to watch, and a lot of it was about Germany and Japan and how they rebuilt after the war and the impact their cars had in the U.K. and the impact that had on the British manufacturers.

So there were a lot of factors involved in the fall of British Leyland, bad management, not enough investment, and competing against better designed and better built cars, which the consumer was buying instead of theirs. The writing was on the wall for them unfortunately.

“You mentioned Renault, they are part of the Renault–Nissan–Mitsubishi Alliance. FIAT and Chrysler group are joined.”

You got there before me SoleSurvivor. I was going to mention just that in response to the “Can you imagine … Italy selling every single last one of their car makers to foreigners? … Do you honestly think Nissan has the same place in Britain’s heart and soul as … Fiat and Ferrari to the Italians? “. For completeness, Ferrari is also part of and 90% owned by the Fiat Chrysler Automobiles Group which is headquartered in the Netherlands.

A quick web search tells me that there are 195 countries on the planet (depending on exactly how one defines a country). In discussing this stuff I tend to arrive at the conclusion that there is actually an extra country, a virtual one that spans the realms of international stock markets, venture capital funding, and the international network of corporate governance arrangements and tax treaties. One can’t really say any more that a big international company is simply “British” or “French” or “Italian”, rather they inhabit this 196th virtual country of finance, tax and governance where from day to day the balance of who actually owns them in terms of traditional nationality, presumably needing to be calculated by analysing the passposts of every single stakeholder in a given company (which would be very complicated because if for instance a company had 10% private equity funding one would then need to look whether that private equity fund was itself a collective enterprise, e.g. a stock-market-listed investment trust somewhere, and then analyse the PE IT’s shareholder distribution in terms of nationality). It’s a constantly shifting and not always entirely clear picture.

For me what is more important is the expertise and production tools that physically reside within a country than matters. If some UK private venture (before it gets big enough to disappear into that “196th country”) starts up and needs to recruit the sort of manufacturing expertise that can be found in the cutting edge of the automotive industry then having that pool of talent at the Nissan factory for instance that it can go fishing in to recruit its first manufacturing director and other appropriate staff is what will help it flourish and it won’t care one jot if the excellent staff it poaches are from Nissan or from some 100% British company. It’s the expertise that matters and we have a lot of that in the UK in both design and manufacturing.

(Chris H0 David Taylor – I guess it depends how you define ‘crap’! We in the UK designed most of the iconic and ground breaking cars in the ’60s to ’80s. The Mini for example but one could list many. Even our Pressed Tool and bodywork assembly was as good as anyone. Pressed Steel developed ‘electrocoat’ painting, full mould casting, robotic welding and assembly, robotic adhesive and sealant application and robotic painting amongst many other industry firsts. Yes long before the Germans and their plastic fuel tanks were better than VW ones. Pressed Steel was the largest independent manufacturer of car bodies and car body tooling in the world and exported globally

So we had the design and engineering capabilities but it was the overall lack of corporate investment and zero quality control where we got it wrong. Management was driven by quarterly profit results demanded by the bankers and failed to provide forward capital. This drove huge mergers which just made the fault lines bigger. And then they heard of ‘diversification’! Pressed Steel made domestic refrigerators, railway rolling stock and even light aircraft ( Beagle). It wasn’t the engineering it was inadequate, arrogant and completely dumb management (aided and abetted by idiot trade unions) that spoiled too many ships for a barrel of tar.

All cars rusted at an alarming rate. I remember unpainted Austin / Morris 1100 bodyshells on open trucks 6 or 8 a time trundling from Swindon Pressed Steel to Austin in Longbridge and Morris in Cowley in all weathers, Winter salted roads and all. My cousin proudly showed us his one year old ex demo Golf Mk I GTI and there were rust bubbles in the front wings. And so it went on.

You spotted why BMW bought ARG in ’94 – It was to remove a complete range of cars from the market place and seize the two brands that had actually survived, improved and were unique – Mini and Range Rover. BMW sold off Land Rover separately to Ford in 2000 but held on to Range Rover until 2006 to get hold of all the brilliant off road and design cues to then build there X series. That was then also sold to Ford who had also snatched Jaguar. JLR was then sold to Tata when Ford itself started to disintegrate due to building crap cars.

Ford of course don’t build cars in the UK and are just another foreign import range. I doubt Bridgend will survive after they stop building engines for JLR now JLR have possibly the most advanced engine plant in Europe.

What goes round comes round

Julian I couldn’t agree more, if you look at a whole host of multi nationals you can see lots of private investment from investment firms from the US to Singapore. And when you breakdown the shareholders it’s usually not a case of 100% nationality being the same as the brand.

It seems to be a problem for some that some of our companies are owned by “foreigners” and it’s usually cars being the main focal point of anger and despair, yet I see no complaints about Tetley or Cadbury, or even better I never see any complaints about premier league football teams, the most supported and most successful being foreign owned.

And like in your comment further down it works both ways, and a prime example for both these points is the second largest company in Europe, BP, it not only bought a lot of large British companies it also purchased standard oil of Ohio, ARCO and Amoco from the US. And BP’s chairman is Swedish, it’s corporate structure ranges from investment firms and banks in the US and London to a bank in Norway. Yet it’s still a British company, supporting over a 100k jobs here and contributed over £10b to he economy each year.

“For me what is more important is the expertise and production tools that physically reside within a country than matters.”

Precisely, it’s the industry that matters, and like Chris said in his comment the expertise and engineering never left, it has stayed and flourished. I really can’t see any problem in the parent group of a successful British company that is manufacturing and investing in the U.K. is overseas.

You can’t see any problem with our undoubted British genius being used almost exclusively to make money for foreigners? You know which other country has done this? None. It is a humiliation for Britain.

It is not just some things, if it was just some things we could accept it, it is practically everything (power generation, car making, railways, mining, train making, steel making, etc., etc., etc.). Indeed it has been to such an extent in Britain that it has very obviously been planned, this has been done on purpose for some reason, there is absolutely no way it could have happened to this extent unless it was planned out this way. The government deliberately doesn’t support British heavy industry and hasn’t for decades, they have in fact waged a deliberate and organized war against British heavy industry. Every single chance they get they don’t support it (Harrier, TSR2, tilting train, intercity 250, R.F.A. tankers, etc., etc., etc.). And if anything ever does emerge like Zephyr it is instantly sold to foreigners. Britain’s heavy industry hasn’t practically disappeared by accident it was all done deliberately. It was planned this way.

It is government policy that Britain’s heavy industry must be destroyed or owned by foreigners.

You guys mention only a bare few foreign car companies who are owned by foreigners, like I say the U.S.A., France, Germany, Japan, Italy, etc. have not sold every single last one of theirs to foreigners, and they never would, let alone do that and sell all their powers station, railways, other industries, etc., on top of that like we have.

Look, no one is saying we should make every single thing for ourselves or that every single company in the U.K. has to be British, but it has went too far the other way, we make practically nothing for ourselves compared with other comparable countries (France, Germany, Japan, Italy) and practically every single thing is owned by foreigners (power generation, railways, industry, etc.). No other country has pushed things to these absurd lengths. We need to buy at least some things back, and invest in, and support, at least some British owned industries.