Comment: Industry still giving jobs a lift
The phrase 'bailing out the British motor industry' has stuck in the craw of many in recent days as the Government is asked for cash to save Jaguar-Land Rover. What British motor industry, they say.
Auto emotive: Britian has remained a motor capital of the world
While the last of the volume independent British carmakers died with the ignominious collapse of MG Rover four years ago, Britain never stopped being one of the motor capitals of the world.
Take Ford, for instance. Ford is said to have quit Britain when it shut the landmark Dagenham factory at the beginning of the decade. Not so .
Ford is one of Britain's biggest direct employers with 35,000 people - against the 65,000 who work at Lloyds TSB, which continues to exist only because of the taxpayers' largesse.
Many work in the 500 Ford-owned dealerships, but the company continues to employ 3000 engineers in research and development in Essex and produces up to a million diesel engines at that plant in Dagenham. US giant General Motors, known here as Vauxhall, employs 5000 on Merseyside and in Luton. Plants run by Toyota, Nissan and Honda in Derbyshire, Sunderland and Swindon directly employ almost 15,000 people.
Jaguar-Land Rover, owned by Tata of India, may have stopped being British a long time ago, having passed through Ford's hands, but is still operational in the UK at Halewood, Castle Bromwich and Gaydon. Other great names of the industry's past Cowley, Crewe and Longbridge are plants in some form of production, albeit for the Germans, of BMWs Minis, the Volkswagen-owned Bentley or through the Chinese trying to breathe life back into MG.
What we have in 2008 is a motor industry that, of course, is not British-owned - but never stopped employing workers in the hundreds of thousands up and down the UK supply chain.
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