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That dude in the glasses reminds me of little Britain

Bloody unions ,1970s ruined this country .

Most militant workers in UK.

I think its a Beautiful car!

Opening scenes have 2 workers entering in Vauxhall Viva HB's - says it all

BL is a study on how not to do things

Liverpudlians have a well deserved reputation of biting the hand that feeds them. I moved from Speke, my birthplace at the age of 17 and never went back. And it wasn't a new attitude. Liverpool dockers went on strikes during the war. Imagine U-Boat surviving merchant ship crews on convoys reaching their home port and seeing dockers on strike.

Sad, but the destruction was self induced by management, workers, the unions and the government.

Closure cost us the Triumph Lynx. Which was a shame. Sad thing is that the convertible ended up a great car (when built in Solihull and Canley) and the TR8 should have been the car they started with, not finished on. Various governments nobbled the car industry by only allowing assistance if they built factories in Liverpool or Linwood (Scotland) in the case of Rootes.

These are proper men who actually cared about thier job such a shame it went

The scousers always thought Monday and Friday were bank holidays

It was a combination of factors, badly conceived product, underdeveloped,, badly built by a poorly managed militant workforce so it could not succeed. Also I note a certain lack of honesty, the "we sent down for Coventry for right hand wings", well that is not true, as the pressing was done in Speke 1 next door, there was no body pressing facility at Triumph in Coventry.

Scousers did a mint job there All them strikes and for what Kids that sit at home on benefits 😂

Lazy socialist dregs.

It was the unions striking that caused the Speke plant to close. Michael Edwardes forced its closure. The hopeless workers at Speke deserved to lose their jobs.

A discontented, poorly motivated workforce is a primary issue for management to address and resolve. Poor product design and chaotic logistics and inadequate build quality demonstrates wholly inept management, both middle management whose responsibility it is to resolve and coordinate such issues, with senior management oblivious or nonchalant to the production chaos. American “Ford” achieved great and sustained success for decades in the UK with similar workers, indeed Ford’s highly efficient and productive Halewood plant was located on Merseyside too, so not an inherent local culture of failure, as some YT commentators have claimed. Working together, as a team with shared goals and sharing in the success makes the difference. The same culture and attitude that destroyed Britain’s own motor industry by failure, also delivered the failed Brexshit nonsense project too. Seems our problem is choosing leaders of substance, capable of understanding issues, leading, with ideas and an understanding that deliver industrial and commercial prosperity.

When the very people building the car call it a load of bloody rubbish, one can only imagine what pride they must have taken in their workmanship.

Socialists have historically done great damage to the British Economy.

Please see my other comment about British cars. In 1967, I owned a lovely Austin 4 door sedan with a standard transmission and lovely comfortable leather seats. It was a very nice car but this car also, spent so much time in the repair shop that it also convinced me that I could not afford to waste so much time with a vehicle that would suddenly stop working on the highway as I went to university. The present Rover and other British vehicles look comfortable and classy, but I worry about the transmissions and electrical components and would never buy one. I anticipate that eventually no cars will be made in Britain. It is a competitive world out there which the British sadly ignore ( Brexit ). I wish they could change their thinking and pay more attention to how tough and competitive the world really is.

My father bought mostly Land Rovers in the 1960’s and 1970’s. Most of the time they were in the garage. The mechanics did not say nice things about Land Rovers. Since then, I would never buy a British car and it is now 2022. I now buy only Japanese as I feel American cars are not consistently of good enough quality or reliability. Too bad for the workers. It is a shame.

My father bought British cars right through the sixties and most of the seventies, he always bought British,I remember he bought a Renault 12 in 1978, he said he was no longer gonna buy British out of loyalty they were just thrown together.

Closing all British manufacturing saved the country from borrowing trillions of pounds to pay a scumbag bunch of communists who forever couldn't do a days work like the German and Japanese workers did , all the world knows what human garbage the British industrial workers were , its hard to believe that they ever were were a world power .

0:00 to 0:35 What cars are the Triumph factory workers driving? I only recognize a Volvo Amazon and a Ford Cortina (I think). Can anyone identify more of these cars? I suspect not a lot of them were BL products?

My favorite of more than 70 of Bruce's songs that like. Maybe my favorite of all songs.

Harold Wilson made Triumph move to his constituency a stupid political decision.

Met Bruce October 2019 memorable

I recall watching this on the BBC "Nationwide" news programme, back in the day.

The governments of the day should have bit the bullet and clipped the wings of the unions and weeded out the communist element that dogged factories and in heavy industries like Mrs Thatcher government did years later

Job Centre man awaiting "unskilled" assembly workers. Was it any wonder the warranty claims were high ?

Self denial run riot, my TR6 was a rot box, no doubt left outside during the numerous strikes at Speke , One has to ask what do these men do now they lost a well paid job perhaps through greed and a union leadership with a large hidden agenda. They were crazy times for all concerned.

Lazy Scousers..... nothing changes.

muppets

I had a TR6. It was the most unreliable car I've ever owned. However, when it worked, it was fun and involving. The TR7 was similarly unreliable but was ugly, effete, inadequately powered and boring. Whoever came up with the design must have been a competing company's infiltrator, sent into BL to destroy the company. It worked.

What an incredibly, incredibly biased and misdirected report. I was old enough to buying cars and driving at the time ... the build quality was incredibly poor. Yes I watched TR7s come off the truck with mismatched seats, missing parts and in several cases with engines having rod knocks due to missing bearing caps. Now many many decades I own a well sorted pair of stock TR7s and they are great little machines. I'll be keeping mine forever. As to production numbers ... well over 100,000 sold in North America dispells that myth and that was inspite of that very same build quality problems. Sure the car had design issues, needed more power and a 5 speed to be competitive in the market. I am sure there were management issues. But it was the build quality problems were the arrow to the heart. I knew many first time TR7 buyers that loved the car, but would never buy another due to build issues. My experiences anyway.

Merseyside had three car factories in the 1970s producing small rival saloons being the Ford Escort at Halewood, the Triumph Toledo at Speke, and across the Mersey, the Vauxhall Viva at Ellesmere Port, well just beyond the Merseyside boundary in Cheshire.

The Triumph plant closed when I was 2. I grew up a couple of miles away from it and there is an Asda and small retail park there now (opened 1987). Originally, it was known as the TR7 retail park and there was a (slightly rusty) example in a glass enclosure. The pub they sit in I'm guessing is the nearby Hillfoot which is part of the Stonehouse pub chain nowadays. A few years after the factory closed my Dad took me to see the factory site and I remember seeing lots of twisted rusted metal everywhere off the buildings I'm guessing. A bloke who used to live by me (died years back) worked there and he said it was an easy job, never did much. Needless to say he never worked again after that as he was work shy. However, the majority of Liverpool people work hard. There was a combination of many factors why it failed in this case and calling it the 'Merseyside disease' shows how biased the report was.

I am from Sweden but I am very interested in british accents and dialects. If you look at the scene from the pub from 5:24 to 8:14 there seems to be different accents. It starts of with a man sounding more intellectual than the others. Than we have some drunks that don't sound exactly the same. If you you are an expert on british accents, where are these people from since I don't think they sound the same?

That idiot at 0.42 that stated they would strike until it closed if necessary, well he got his wish. If this is the attitude to there work/workplace then there is no help. Frankly the workmanship was appalling and therefore thats why the public didn't but the vehicles. Unions ruled and thats what brought about the Thatcher government.

One of my favourites.

The British Car industry failed because of communist work shy union leaders who didn’t understand what the word WORK meant.

They built a new factory in a run down part of Liverpool what on earth were the management they thinking. They had the that’ll do mentality on everything they touched. Some of the cars they produced it’s like what on earth had they been taking the design’s were awful. Oh I forgot “that’ll do”. Haha.

Always on strike

Take Trade Unions out of Leyland and the company would have gone to the demise that it did...It had none of the fundamentals to be a success. Blaming trade unions is the age old post war story of placing the blame where it does not lie...It fits an easy right wing narrative...

Scousers are twats, brain dead, they think they are gods gift but in reality they couldn't build anything except chaos, they are lazy, stupid and incompetent, nice combo.

That factory is still there, it now called ellesmere port.

Interesting comments from the one fella in the pub. Definitely true that fan failures, gear box failures etc can't be placed at the feet of the final assemblers. Also no doubt that the scousers were terrible workers. My dad was a senior exec at the Plessey Edge Lane plant back then, also in Liverpool. Scousers were/are notorious thieves and chancers ( clearly not all but also far too many ). Brits in general just don't have a work ethic. I started my working life in '82 at a GEC Telecom plant in Coventry. A sprawling campus of idlers with almost nobody doing any actual work. You could get in trouble for being remotely productive. Actually being good at your job is considered proletarian treachery. In all fairness, I haven't worked in the UK in 25 years so a miracle may have occurred ( but I doubt it ).

Gaius!

I thought this was a pilot for another season of The Office UK, a mockumentary right? Then to find out this is a documentary just makes it comedic gold, the only thing missing is Ricky Gervais and Karl Pilkington.

Worker's are not too blame it was piss poor management and unloyal British buyer's buying foreign.

The workers interviewed should have made a motivational video. Their incredible positive energy is epic, can't believe the plant failed and produced absolute metal turds.