Bygone Britain: The Demise of British Leyland
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 23 ก.ค. 2023
- Once the pride of Britain's automobile industry, British Leyland became a symbol of industrial decline and corporate failure. This documentary explores the internal and external factors that led to the company's downfall, and the impact it had on the British economy and working-class communities. A documentary by Jack Lloyd-Lucas.
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A very thorough, concise history of what happened to British Leyland, enjoyed it very much.
Many thanks for your feedback.
On a parallel, we lived near to the Corby steelworks and was in a nearby pub when the steelworkers were having a strike meeting. The strikers said that the UK car makers should be forced by the government to buy only british steel. The irony was that i went into the steelworks regularly, and the car park was full of Datsuns, Renault, Lada, etc., all foreign cars. The workers wanted the cheapest deals but weren't bright enough to think things through.
Very interesting story you have there, it would have been nice to tie this into the documentary.
@@jacklloyd-lucas I’m sure you’re right, but too late I’m afraid.
As a young painter I worked for a bodyshop carrying out warranty work for another car manufacturer, we had to take out the badly shaped lead loading on the C pillars, it was a continuous contract.
When the manufacturer’s warranty manager came round to carry out inspections, some one asked why they weren’t done properly at the factory in the first place, or rejected and re worked at source - the answer was that management were told to F off. The unions thought they were being cocky but ended up striking themselves out of a job.
One of the issues in the film was trying to increase productivity with a group bonus - the idea was that the fastest, hungriest worker would kick (encourage) the slowest to work harder. This never, ever works, eventually everyone works to the level of the slowest productive for obvious reasons.
The German and Japanese car industries had the advantage of starting almost from scratch, whereas the UK situation was resistance to change. After I sold my bodyshop to my partner, I went into consulting, and resistance to change was one of the biggest issues that confronted me.
It was symptomatic of the UK car production industry as a whole.
Well put together jake the strikes indeed never seemed to end and nice you didn't go on strike whilst making this 😀
Such a shame that Triumph went belly up. They made some damn fine cars and were on level with the finest from Europe.
I can attest to this, my own 1974 Triumph Dolomite Sprint is a work of art and I adore it.
Well made - very professional!
Thank you very much.
The best British Leyland video on TH-cam!! Thank you.
Thank you for your kind words!
@@jacklloyd-lucas’Speech!’, ‘Speech!’
Not a serious documentary
Such a shame all those marques were amalgamated. I can't help thinking some of them might still be around if they'd remained independent.
it was them men who got a good wage for car workers now , but not for Amazon workers they run round like clowns for pennies
Spot on about Amazon, Slaves more like it.
@@stormytempest6521Yes! (Extended strikes are the doing of employers.)
Does that means that Amazon workers are clowns who run around for pennies - and continues to do it?
And McDonalds workers in the US as well?
And why don’t the workers do anything about it?
I’ve read that the Danish BL import in the very early 70’s decided to try importing a japanese car too, I believe it was Mazda, but I’m not sure. When writing the first order for the cars, they’d order the same amount of spareparts as they have been used to with BL, to cover the expected warranty claims. To their surprise they’d had just about the same amount of spareparts 10 years later.
There was no warranty claims. The cars just worked as they should.
This rings a bell with me, I faintly recall one of my interviewees talking about something related to this between interview recordings, with a friend or colleague of some sorts being in some sort of relation to a Danish car dealer during the mid-70s. He recalled something along the lines of lack of post-sale work and maintenance, as the dealers were focusing upon imported cars such as Japanese and German ones, which needed little post-sale warranty repairs and maintenance.
The Leyland, on its own, could probably have gone decently for a while. In the long run margins on cars are slim and R&D quite expensive, so at some point they would have needed to get into some largee group.
But BMC/BMH was a clusterfuck, saddled with debt with no replacement models in the work.
Very nicely done to weave in the 3 day week on this!
Many thanks, I tried to include every variable towards the workplace struggles within this documentary.
Might as well done 3 days... if was done...in ...THREE DAYS....why frig around for 2 more ...
Hey we're looking at one right now....Tesla...a super rich with no humility..( (Musk had NOTHING to do with Tesla...he's just a mouth) ...engineering now and manufacturing in general doesn't need workers... and....GRIDLOCK... how many cars can you fit on road....
Nonsense Edwards was an opportunist...all talk...he knew it was dead and spun a yarn ..then pissed off with a bundle of money ...
@1.28, BMH wasn't formed until 1966, you mean B.M.C (British Motor Corperation) which was formed in 1952
Trying to do too much with too little! Sometimes focus is the hardest thing to achieve in a large corporation!
Very good point.
Has nothing to do with the closure of the firm.
Think more deeply.
Yes probably true,but today there is also a copying of car forms especially SUV,s and use of ideas are still carried on with using the forms and designs of different car companies like Rover 75 grill used on an Audi or Astinmartin grill used on Ford cars
Yeh right 😡Longbridge was always going out on strike ... I done near 21 years at Longbridge.. er ... let me think .. how many strikes did we have er ... 2 ... started November 26th 1984 .. there was a fork lift truck driver dispute in the cabs ... 2 day dispute .. including the weekend ... fast forward .. 1986 .. 1am .. working 20ft from a roller shutter door ... in the New West Works ...snow storm and cold wind coming through... gave management 3 hours to do “something “ ignored us .. home we went .... finally was there .. on nights... 12th April 2005 ...21.45 on radio news flash ... receivers called in at Longbridge.. we all knew it was the end as the last 6to 9 months only producing fully about 3 and a half days a week... Knew our future partnership, as I shall call them , was not going to take place , as they took a MASSIVE step backwards on purpose about 2or 3 month before closure ,and were “WAITING “for the big BANG , so they could swoop in like vultures and pick it all up on the cheap... A strong rumour had it that all the new body build jigs were in the UK “somewhere” also the fact contractors had started converting The New West for the new model ... Unless you worked there you had NO idea what was happening and what GOOD and HARD WORKING people were there...All I would say is outsiders need to think outside of the box before slagging US off ... I now go to many classic car shows and surprised how MANY people love our cars .. young and old ... EVERY car company made crap cars ... because it was us IT WAS heavily jumped on
Many thanks for your interesting story and feedback, I’d just like to iterate that I am a British Leyland fanatic, and own a Dolomite Sprint and Rover Metro, and am in no way slating on the company, but rather ensuring that they’re story is told as transparently as possible. Thanks.
I think you got the wrong end of my story.... yes ... by the way you produced and commented on this video and the way that you replied to other comments I know that you supported B.L ....I am sorry that you thought I was having a go at YOU... I was wasn’t ...I have a Triumph Stag... she’s beautiful 😜... but people still bad mouth them ... all 70s cars were primitive ...Ford Vauxhall etc .....hope you keep producing these 2 sided ... good and bad sides ... videos coming ....As someone else has said Classic Car Owners now own B.L ... best wishes
Stokes didn't think rallying cars was a good idea to sell cars he got rid of Cooper & Healey
Great documentary !
Thank you very much.
Excellent documentary...thx u for sharing all that knowledge
Many thanks for your kind words.
@@jacklloyd-lucas not alone Leyland...u guys lost all those other major uk brand names of cars , trucks, aircraft, motorcycle ,tractor ,boat ,gun; bicycle , tooling industries,clothes, the list goes on many of these to me were household names all over the world for 100 years !...
@@liambrett6000How? Why?
Excellent Documentary Sir!
Thank you very much!
What is your connection to the commentator?
I went to school near the Longbridge plant and noticed as a child that many of the workers didn't drive the cars. It still makes my blood boil to this day, certain workers driving Datsun etc.
If they had attempted to they'd have never gotten to work, not even for the three day week!
I lived near British Steel in Corby, was present at a union meeting where they demanded that the British car industry be forced to use only British steel. I had to go regularly past the worker's car park which was full of Datsuns, Renault, Ladas, Polski Fiat's etc. The double standards were staggering.
@@jackthebassman1 well you can try to lay that irony onto the workers but really you cannot.
How much was the average British car?
Ahhhh see that's why they drove everything else they could not afford the very thing they was building.
But of course they knew if they are getting x out of each car then they could pay more. If only the company had paid more then they would've been able to sell more cars.
So the irony is simply we the big company x is going to make a product that's too high for our own work force and that's because we pay them shit, that's why they drive other brands that they can afford. But we're going to whine about it anyway and so will our stooges!
Got the same problem right here in America.
Seems like gm didn’t learn their lesson from British Leland and made the same mistake almost 30 years later. Identical models competing with each other for the same place in the market.
Edit: not to mention an overstretched budget, cheap or poor build quality and terrible design.
There’s nothing wrong with competing inside the walls. Today Toyota Aygo/Peugeot 107/Citroën C1 share the same technic but with different bodyparts and they’re all doing fine.
Some good footage & reasonable observations but the usual "inherited wisdom" which when viewed with the benefit of hindsight are blatantly obvious, this wasn't necessarily so obvious at the time. There were many issues, there were major civil happenings, it was a tough time.
Thank you for your feedback
Of course - We must also give consideration to the possibility that the routine assertion made by commentators - the standard claim that workers are either greedy or inflexible - is really a rallying call to the right wing - a ‘face saver’ for the McCarthyist part of society.
Lovely! Does anyone know what band is performing during the end credits?
T. Rex - Jeepster 😁.
@@jacklloyd-lucasGet it right, MARK BOLAM and T. REX.😁
@@stormytempest6521The irony is you spelt Marc Bolan wrong when correcting him... 🙂
Great look back at the British motor industry of half a century plus ago. I was just a kid with a great dinky and corgi collection!
What was the documentary about?
This bloke sir edwards thingy ...jeeez he took you for a ride... in the back seat of a mini ....
Love the documentary and the fact that you, unlike 99% of BL accounts, are using primary sources, gives a ground floor perspective. Please mix the audio louder next time though, a punk rock lifestye left me hard of hearing.
Many thanks for your feedback!
@@jacklloyd-lucas Best of luck with this channel friend
@@kenon6968 Thank you, I plan on doing a car feature on the Dolomite Sprint soon, and a mini-series detailing the lost metal mines of Central Wales, where I’m from, in the next few months, please subscribe if you’re interested.
@@jacklloyd-lucas I particularly like that you gave Edwardes and Robinson a fair shake: the former did about as good as anyone could have done, the latter is a more complex figure.
Robinson was certainly committed to the principle of worker participation. In a non adversarial context cooperative management practices weren't even that off base, it's essentially the Japanese Kaizen management model that every auto manufacturer jumped on in the 90s. But somewhere along the line ideological conviction turned into sheer bloody mindedness....for worker control of the means of production to work out, they first have to be, well, working.
@@kenon6968Not even Thatcher would go as far as to say that British workers were not working at an ‘ADEQUATE’ pace.
You are just blowing smoke.
Couple of points - firstly the union issues are overblown - every major car producing country had severe issues with industrial action at this time, the difference in the UK was the management was particularly awful. Ford/Vauxhall/Chrysler (and later Japanese companies) did better because they engaged with the union leaders and worked out their differences.
Second, the other "British" car companies were hardly doing all that well either. Chrysler UK had been effectively running insolvent for several years and was being propped up by their more successful colleagues in France. It was a similar story at Ford and GM to an even greater degree, and by 1975 all three companies had all but shut down the UK R&D teams, with cars from these companies coming from the continent, and merely assembled here, not engineered. It took decades for the British consumer to cotton on to this, if course.
Nissan demonstrated that there is nothing inherently wrong with the British factory worker.
That's incorrect. The union issues were DEFINITELY one of the death blows. German auto company managers were spending an average of 5% of their time on such issues, whereas British ones were spending over three quarters of their time on those. It's simply unsustainable.
Nissan only started to prove what you claim in 1986 (that's when they started manufacturing in the UK), which was the very year they were assured the unions would no longer hold the powers they previously had. Thatcher had clamped down on overzealous unions by that time, so the proposition of investing in the UK seemed a lot better than it was 10 years earlier.
British cars are infamous for poor quality thanks to British Leyland - even today, brands like Jaguar (which was directly affected by the BL disaster) still struggle with image problems rooted in their questionable quality in the 1970s and early 80s, despite statistics showing they have caught up with and sometimes even surpassed the Germans regarding quality/reliability by now. (Once people get that idea into their heads, it is incredibly difficult to change people's minds, as people already have other brands they favour). All the others already went bankrupt for similar reasons.
To “jasonj4437” - P.S. it crosses my mind that your detractor - (Mr “AAWT”) - may be the alter ego of our documentary film maker.
@@AAWTWRONG! The first and final blow was the government forced merger followed by the government outright take over of the company!
See, the common worker saw the company get bigger and technically have more sales thus more money, but oh boy they sure as hell didn't get any of it.
They'd ask they might get peanuts. They demanded they might have gotten two more peanuts.
Meanwhile people like Stokes who knew Jack shit about the auto manufacturing business was paid stupid salaries for nothing but trying to keep the workforce down.
Battling all the time not making product or making shit product massively inefficient
(that's government) Yep it was a government run shit show.
I'll tell ya one thing about these folks that like it or not today's work force especially the young have in common and it's making a big come back that's simply, THEY'RE NOT BUYING THE PIZZA PARTY BULLSHIT!
used to buy rover all the time like meastro , rover 216 , 416 gti , montego and many if the idiots didn't keep going on strike it could be still here the work force took them down too
Do you mean what you say?
Under what circumstances would you go on strike?
What was the alternative to going on strike?
@victorsauvage1890 working and doing youre job that is the alternative
Please read my comments on this video ... with respects we were NOT IDIOTS... at the time that you bought your cars BMW were just about to buy us ...and ... in the 21 years I was there only had 2 strikes at Longbridge and that was in the early 80s....I was there the night Longbridge shut...why then did BMW nick the mini ... which still uses Rover 75 door mirrors and front seats ... nick the BMW 1 series... which was going to be a new Rover ... which I may add we went to The Kremlin and they told us so .... ok .. the underframe of the 75 was a 5 series but Rover still had to do other development ... body panels etc... and all the machinery to build these cars...Rover paid for... all this was put down as a LOSS... that was the 500mil loss and called the English patient ...stop us making the Tracer/ Estate/Tomcat ... especially the Turbo version as it would have taken sales off the 3 series... I think you need to know ALL THE FACTS before commenting
Great content, but there's an insane amount of mains hum from your audio, and you could use a pop filter also.
Thanks for the feedback.
This was my final university submission, so funds were non-existent, I had borrowed the best mic I could find from my university equipment storeroom.
@@jacklloyd-lucas I call it a success then. I watched until the end, hum be damned!😉👍
@@EddieG1888What did you think of the theme? What was the conclusion?
Of all the arguments which could have been put forward in support of the industrial action taken by the employees - but not mentioned by the commentator - which do you think was the most important?
Would you agree that this documentary is liable to give a casual observer the impression that the principal explanation for the collapse of British Leyland was the reckless industrial action by British Leyland employees?
Is the evidence put forward in the documentary really sufficient to justify that conclusion?
@@victorsauvage1890 Ok, just to answer your points.
1. I don't feel it was the job of the commentator to indulge in conjecture, and present anything beyond the information about BL which is a matter of historical fact. The commentator presented sources such as direct quotes and news articles, and didn't paraphrase anything.
2. No, I wouldn't. I think he presented the constant threat of and the actual numerous actual strikes in the 70s (a period which was well known for industrial action in such other places as the Rootes Linwood car plant, and the strikes by Ford workers towards the end of the decade) as a problem which plagued industry across the country.
Part of BL's problems lay with its inability to manage its finances adequately, and producing models of cars which quite simply didn't sell. Also, what didn't help was being one umbrella company made up of numerous small marques, who were very often competing against one another in model ranges.
The management of BL had the intention of strangling out competition by simply producing more cars than them, which inevitably led to quality issues, which then led to increased man hours and pressure to ensure these didn't happen, which coupled with working conditions which weren't really improved led to the discontent with the workforce. This is also a matter of historical fact.
BL's demise was entirely their own fault for not moving with the times; in business, in manufacturing, and in man-management, and were still arrogantly acting like a 1960s British company rather than one moving in to the 1980s.
3. The documentary doesn't have to justify that conclusion, because it didn't arrive at and attempt to force that as its conclusion. It's you who has asserted that it has, so the onus is on you to present why you feel that was the underlying tone of the piece..
@@victorsauvage1890 Ok, just to answer your points.
1. I don't feel it was the job of the commentator to indulge in conjecture, and present anything beyond the information about BL which is a matter of historical fact. The commentator presented sources such as direct quotes and news articles, and didn't paraphrase anything.
2. No, I wouldn't. I think he presented the constant threat of and the actual numerous actual strikes in the 70s (a period which was well known for industrial action in such other places as the Rootes Linwood car plant, and the strikes by Ford workers towards the end of the decade) as a problem which plagued industry across the country.
Part of BL's problems lay with its inability to manage its finances adequately, and producing models of cars which quite simply didn't sell. Also, what didn't help was being one umbrella company made up of numerous small marques, who were very often competing against one another in model ranges.
The management of BL had the intention of strangling out competition by simply producing more cars than them, which inevitably led to quality issues, which then led to increased man hours and pressure to ensure these didn't happen, which coupled with working conditions which weren't really improved led to the discontent with the workforce. This is also a matter of historical fact.
BL's demise was entirely their own fault for not moving with the times; in business, in manufacturing, and in man-management, and were still arrogantly acting like a 1960s British company rather than one moving in to the 1980s.
3. The documentary doesn't have to justify that conclusion, because it didn't arrive at and attempt to force that as its conclusion. It's you who has asserted that it has, so the onus is on you to present why you feel that was the underlying tone of the piece..
Thats right..superior rich people...im better than you....and unionists wh dont give a shit....what could possibly go wrong..
My mazda rotted away lmao ahh well
triumph dollopofshite
You are full of hot air
Mr Dictionary has deserted us?