HOW SMALL a splash. Once a flagship of the British car industry, still a name with resonance, still one of the biggest employers in the West Midlands — and down Rover goes this weekend, sharing the Saturday headlines with a royal wedding and a papal funeral as the waters close over the head of a century-old marque and the ripples die.
I know that is not how it will feel in Birmingham, not how it will feel to thousands who are losing their livelihoods, but their distress will only be deepened by the knowledge that the rest of Britain will tut-tut and — in the Prime Minister’s phrase — move on. It will be a difficult few days for the Government, which it knows it can handle, and which it knows will pass.
What a change that marks. I was a young Tory MP in the mid-1980s when manufacturing industry was sinking all over Britain. Cabinet ministers would be hauled ashen-faced into the Commons as each new announcement hit the press. The trade unions would bawl for bailouts, the Labour Party would shout their rage and despair, we government backbenchers would stare glumly at the green carpet as seasick ministers rocked on the front bench, bishops would call down curses on the “North-South divide ”, and the media would wring its hands and wail.
Today nobody is seriously calling for a bailout. The Prime Minister and his Chancellor pay a state visit to express sympathy, and Patricia Hewitt will be left to tidy up the rest of the political mess.
Ms Hewitt, the Trade and Industry Secretary, is helped by a trade union, which from the outset strikes a note of complete resignation, and an official Opposition who are taking great care not to suggest that they would have done more. That all seem to agree that state subsidy is not the solution is striking. More striking still is that in the heat of a hard-fought general election campaign both major parties are warier about the charge of unbusinesslike politicking that a bailout would bring than the accusation that they are uncaring.
Such is the triumph of Thatcherite economics. “Let manufacturing go hang” is the mood. “Britain doesn’t need to make things any more. Sad about those poor workers at Longbridge of course. But when they have dried their eyes they can retrain as self-employed decorators, or open a coffee bar, or move to Spain.” This is the sentiment, though never so brutally expressed.
The failure of ordinary sympathy is shaming. But behind it lies an economists’ doctrine, which is eminently arguable. Nor is it new. But it always used to be a matter of dispute, sometimes bitter dispute. It teaches that the casualties of the death of manufacturing, though humanly sad, are in the longer term economically unimportant, because economic activity does not die, but shifts to more productive fields.
What is striking about Rover’s fall this week is the evidence that this part of Thatcherism is now — and rather suddenly — considered on all sides, and by most of the public, as being beyond dispute.
There is now nobody of any consequence on the front bench of any serious party in Britain who rejects this teaching. From beyond the grave the late Keith Joseph, Margaret Thatcher’s first Industry Secretary whose agonised front-bench performances I used to watch as, blown off course by gales of public and political anger, he was forced to pump subsidy into British Leyland, could be forgiven a puzzled smile.
Listening to my radio these last few dawns I have heard hardly a peep from the trades unions. Their only response is what used to be the response of Tory ministers in the 1980s: that what’s important is retraining. Listening to phone-in programmes I have heard an overwhelmingly similar response from the public. Twenty years ago you couldn’t close a loss-making sweet shop without a wave of protest. Now its seems you can close a whole wedge of a regional economy, and people shrug their shoulders. “Tough,” they say.
Twenty years ago, earnest and intelligent voices would have insisted that this was about more than the sweet-shop; it was about the sweet shop’s suppliers, the sweet shop’s shop assistant, the structure of local employment, the cohesion of the local community, the health of high-street trading, the needs of the shop’s mobility-impaired customers.
Everything (you would be assured) had a “knock-on effect” on something or somebody else. Today all seem to agree that it’s a rough old world out there, and if you can’t hack it you’d better make way for businesses that can. The speed and the scale of the ideological shift have been startling.
But among new Labour, the strange death of anxiety about manufacturing industry can be attributed to more than an ideological shift. It is partly and importantly a question of style.
Trade unions are not where new Labour wants to be: they are not the look. Metal-bashing isn’t the look either. Overalls aren’t the look. That a Labour government automatically supports a unionised workforce in an unsmart industry is precisely the assumption that Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson came into politics to rebut. Such was their success that Labour no longer needs fading city constituencies to win. Never mind the mood at Longbridge: how are they feeling in Hemel Hempstead?
The phrase “cool Britannia” became uncool for Tony, but once a dedicated follower of fashion, always so. Among the regions of England, Birmingham isn’t cool. Among the localities that make up Birmingham, Longbridge isn’t cool. Among the sectors of our economy, manufacturing isn’t cool. Among segments of our electorate, blue-collar workers aren’t cool. Among cars, Rovers aren’t cool. Among car-owners, Rover-drivers aren’t cool.
Poor Longbridge workers. An uncool group of voters in an uncool part of an uncool city manufacturing an uncool marque in an uncool sector of the economy. These cars are an honorary part of the Forces of Conservatism. It would not surprise me if the Tories’ in-house “Voter Vault” marketing database actually listed Rover-ownership as an indicator of a likely Conservative vote. So not only the workers but the customers too are peripheral to new Labour’s brutal focus.
I doubt I caricature the way some within that party machine think when I predict that there will even have been voices whispering in Mr Blair’s ear that letting Rover go could actually prove a plus for him in this campaign: a parable, an object lesson, a dramatic demonstration of how far new Labour have moved from the bad old days of industrial intervention. Pity it had to clash with the Pope’s funeral, really, or it might have got more attention; ah well, hopefully another big industry will crash before May 5, and we won’t bail them out either.
Last year in these columns Anatole Kaletsky and I had a three-stage debate: one column from me and a two-column response from Anatole. I asked whether it really was true that the trade balance didn’t matter, and manufacturing things didn’t matter, any more. Anatole argued that where in the world an item is manufactured is unimportant as long as we get the profits.
I think Anatole won that debate. His argument, though more expertly framed than I could ever make it, was at heart the argument my fellow Tories on the government back benches were trying to get across all through the early 1980s.
We believed it then with a confidence which our sense of being ideological missionaries in a hostile world served only to bolster. This weekend it seems the whole world believes it. I begin to feel unnerved. I sure hope we were right.
