How my car worker dad’s legacy — and Britain plc — has been shamefully betrayed by Honda

According to local legend, it was possible to hear the town’s hooters 25 miles away, on Lord Bolingbroke’s Lydiard Park estate.

Starting at 6.45am and continuing until 7.30am, they were used by workers at the Pressed Steel Fisher plant, which made car parts, to know when their shift started.

The noise played a central role in the life of people such as me when i was a young boy in my hometown of Swindon.

indeed, to my dad, a welder for the best part of 40 years on the assembly line of Pressed Steel, the hooters were an alarm clock.

His day began with a 17second blast from the hooter.

Pressed Steel, which was started in 1955, grew to become Swindon’s biggest employer with 6,600 workers at its peak. Eventually, it became part of British Leyland and, in 1981, there was a major tie-up with Honda.

Meltdown

The Japanese giant began producing its own designs of the Triumph Acclaim on the same site where my dad had toiled, never missing a day’s work, even when struck down by pneumonia or crippled by back pain.

The Japanese investment was a huge and symbolic step in the company’s development. At the time, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher championed this country as the perfect outpost for Japanese car-makers looking for access to Europe.

Swindon thus became a centre of the car’s thriving European market. But no longer.

Tragically, it all looks very different today. on Monday, Honda announced it will close its Swindon car plant in 2021, with 3,500 workers, who build 160,000 diesel Honda civics a year, losing their jobs. Thousands more, some suggest 10,000, will lose their jobs in the supply line.

My late dad would be heartbroken. The descendants of his generation who still live in the town will feel betrayed.

The brutal fact is that Honda’s decision marks a totemic moment in this country’s manufacturing history. our car- making heritage from Sunderland to Swindon risks spluttering to an ignominious halt. As recently as 2012, when Britain’s economy was still recovering from the meltdown in the international banking sector, our car industry had rediscovered its pride and stood tall among competitors.

Exports soared, helped by the booming market in china. The new rich in india and russia had a voracious demand for British marques.

in 2012, the renaissance was complete when the sector recorded its first trade surplus since 1976.

in the most recent figures, for 2017, the UK motor vehicle manufacturing industry contributed £15.2billion to the economy, 0.8pc of total output and 8.1pc of manufacturing output. There was a jobs boom. Since 2010, employment in the sector has grown by 29pc from 126,000 to 162,000.

in real terms, motor manufacturing was worth 25pc more in 2017 than ten years previously — a truly remarkable achievement.

The value of exports in 2017 was £ 34.3 billion, up from £31.5 billion in 2016.

in another healthy sign, Britain became home to most of the Formula one racing teams — many in a cluster of specialist firms in an area near oxford known as Motorsport Valley.

But none of this will impress Swindonians today with the Honda axe. The story of our town has been that of great Britain plc in a microcosm.

History books tell us that, in a previous age, the Wiltshire town had been a major industrial centre thanks to the railway. Located halfway between Bristol and London on isambard Kingdom Brunel’s great Western railway, it was perfectly situated for workshops which manufactured and repaired locomotives and rolling stock.

But by the middle of the last century, Swindon had powered on and was Britain’s king of the car. My dad’s firm, Pressed Steel Fisher, had been in the vanguard of this booming industry — making body panels for most major UK car companies, including rollsroyce, rootes and Standard.

However, during the 1970s, the wheels began to fall off the UK car industry.

With the nation on a slippery slope to self-destruction after the disastrous Three- day Week, nothing symbolised the industrial strife wrecking the economy more than British Leyland car plants. (Pressed Steel Fisher had become part of British Leyland in 1968.)

Union wreckers such as the hard-Left shop steward derek robinson, known as red robbo, brought the company to its knees with a series of strikes and work- to- rules often agreed on a disputed show of hands.

Yet while cowley in oxford and Longbridge in Birmingham were crippled by trade union strife, Swindon, the great survivor, limped on.

My dad made it to the age of 64 when he took voluntary redundancy in 1991.

Sabotage

He had experienced years of despair while witnessing the union sabotage in the 1970s.

All these years later, i can still hear the pain in dad’s voice as he broke the news to Mum that some group of car workers were on strike again.

it really hurt him because he always wanted to provide for his family. Thankfully, from the ashes of British Leyland, my dad’s successor generation saw salvation in the form of the Japanese and Honda.

The town’s end- of- day 4.30pm hooter may long have been silent but there was hope that Honda bosses — like their counterparts at Toyota and nissan elsewhere in Britain who have poured tens of billions of pounds into reviving our car industry — would continue to invest here.

only six months ago, the Japanese bosses pledged they were standing by Swindon despite fears over Brexit and the collapse in sales of diesel cars. ian Howells, senior vice president of Honda Europe, had said: ‘The UK forms part of our global network of manufacturing plants, so the only place we produce the vehicle we produce at Swindon is in Swindon itself.

‘The logistics of moving a factory the size of Swindon’s would be huge and as far as we’re concerned, we’re right behind supporting continued production at Swindon.’

He called Swindon the ‘cornerstone’ of its EU operations. But yesterday he delivered the death-blow. So what’s changed? There has been a shocking lack of forward planning.

Honda failed to diversify quickly enough into the production of electric and driverless cars. it also failed to take into account the effect of the EU’s new free trade deal with Japan.

Dismantling

They also failed to foresee the calamitous drop in diesel sales. in western Europe, the proportion fell from 56pc in 2011 to 44pc in 2017. The same is true for the UK where diesel’s share of new car sales fell from 51pc in 2011 to 42pc in 2017.

Swindon’s story will be just another chapter in what has been the slow dismantling of great Britain plc.

Alongside the car industry, the shipping industry has shrunk. in 1948, British workers still made almost half the world’s tonnage of ships, bolstering families’ lives in ports such as glasgow and Liverpool.

in his book What We Have Lost: The dismantling of great Britain, the historian James Hamilton- Paterson wrote about how the bedrock of our economic powerhouse had been ruined — ‘enough to dissever the epithet “great” from the name of Britain’.

Honda was once Swindon’s biggest private sector employer. Today, because of automation, it’s been edged into second place by nationwide Building Society which employs 4,000.

Sadly, unlike my dad, very few of Honda’s workforce will be able to clock up 40 years with the same employer.

The closure of the Honda plant is a sad parable for the dismantling of great Britain plc.