Hardly a hammer blow if 800 jobs have shifted from Swindon to Solihull

My item last week about brighter prospects for car makers looked forlorn by Friday lunchtime, when news bulletins were leading with a quote from one Tony Murphy of the Unite union to the effect that an announcement of 800 job cuts at Honda’s Swindon plant was ‘a hammer blow to UK manufacturing’. This was followed at the weekend by a rather less emphatic response to a press release from Jaguar Land Rover which included news of 800 extra jobs at Solihull, continuing a sustained expansion of its workforce that began two years ago. I was hoping Murphy might declare himself ‘over the moon’, but he left it to his assistant general secretary Tony Burke to issue a pious welcome making play of the fact that JLR is only offering one-year contracts. ‘We hope we can convert them into well-paid, permanent jobs in the future,’ he said. Interesting use of ‘we’ there, Tony — but we won’t achieve that objective if we talk the industry into despair, will we?

British car factories employ 150,000 people — and the wider automotive sector, all the way to your local Kwik Fit, employs 700,000 — so what equated to a transfer of 800 jobs from Wiltshire to the West Midlands was more a flutter in the breeze of globalisation than a ‘hammer blow’. That was just a good phrase for a headline, and one that played to a lazy narrative of irreversible manufacturing decline; reporters couldn’t be bothered to look closer at why Honda’s exports to Europe have been weak while JLR’s sales to China, Russia and the US have been going gangbusters.

The narrative of decline really did ring true a generation ago, however, when the hard men of Unite’s predecessor, the Amalgamated Engineering Union — the likes of Longbridge convenor Derek ‘Red Robbo’ Robinson — held the British car industry by the goolies, and its management had neither the stomach nor the capital for the fight.