The Rover scandal

When Tony Blair made Stephen Byers Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, it is now clear that he was entrusting that office to the most incompetent, the most cynical and the most financially illiterate Cabinet minister of the last 20 years. This spring the last British-owned volume car manufacturer has been brought to its knees in humiliating circumstances. Five thousand employees of MG Rover are shortly to come on the job market. They will probably be joined by a further 20,000 workers also in the Midlands automotive trades, whose firms are owed hundreds of millions by the expiring company. If they fail soon to find new employment, let us hope that they join forces, on a no-win no-fee basis, with the 55,000 defrauded Railtrack shareholders still pursuing Mr Byers in the High Court for misfeasance of public office, and the destruction of £1.5 billion of value in the company in which they had invested. In each case the lives of workers and shareholders have been blighted by the Labour government: not just by a minister who relentlessly put spin before business sense, but also by the frank incomprehension and dislike of capitalism that is endemic in Labour.

In the case of Railtrack, Mr Byers decided to ‘take back the track’ — to renationalise the railways — not because that was in the interest of railway passengers or the taxpayer. Commuters will remember that performance declined catastrophically after his intervention, while subsidy levels soared. Mr Byers destroyed Railtrack because he was anxious for acclaim on the Labour backbenches, and thought it would play well with those who disapproved of railway privatisation. The more closely one examines his motives in 2000, when he played his part in the sale of Rover, the clearer it is that he was actuated by the same kind of disastrous, short-term political considerations.