Credit where it’s due to Tata, our greatest inward investor

If asked to pick the UK’s inward investor of the century so far I would, without hesitation, name Ratan Tata, the anglophile former patriarch of the eponymous Indian conglomerate that bought Tetley the tea-maker for £271 million in 2000, Corus the Anglo-Dutch steel-maker for £6.2 billion in 2007, and Jaguar Land Rover — from Ford — for £1.3 billion in 2008. We’ve heard a lot lately about Mr Tata’s hubristic folly in buying Corus in the first place; and about his boardroom successors in Mumbai ‘going through the motions’ of finding a buyer for Corus UK —with its Port Talbot blast furnaces symbolising what’s left of our shrunken industrial heritage — while secretly aiming to shut it down to protect Corus’s more modern plant at IJmuiden in Holland, which Tata plans to merge with ThyssenKrupp of Germany, creating a Fortress Europe steel giant to resist the Chinese.

That’s all been made to sound quite sinister, highlighting the peril of relying on footloose foreign capital.