This is what Corbyn’s Life On Mars economics looks like

JEREMY CORBYN’S rapturously received conference speech promising ‘socialism for the 21st century’ coincided with the publication of a poignant series of photographs taken inside the former British Leyland car plant at Longbridge, in Birmingham.

While the Labour leader was outlining his plans for a national Investment Bank, State intervention in industry, greater power for the unions and higher taxes, these photos offered a stark reminder of where such an antediluvian economic policy leads.

Shot inside what remains of the abandoned factory (right), littered with a few rusting husks of half-built Rovers and MGs, the pictures are a monument to industrial decay created by socialist folly. The policies which Corbyn expounds were tested to destruction by Labour in the Seventies. The ailing British Leyland was nationalised in 1975, with the government taking a controlling stake.

Even though it still had a 40 per cent share of the UK car market, it was a basket case. The company was a byword for union militancy and shoddily built, unreliable vehicles, such as the hideously ugly Austin Allegro, often described as the worst car of all time. It was quickly nicknamed the ‘All Aggro’ because of its multiple faults both in design and manufacture.

I remember it well. In the late Seventies, I was industrial correspondent of the Birmingham Evening Mail, daily documenting the decline of the British motor industry.

The Allegro had a square steering wheel. Yes, really. You couldn’t make it up. Who thought that was a good idea? It must have been the work of that committee which set out to design a horse but ended up with a camel.

In an attempt to take the car upmarket, they decided to produce a ‘luxury’ Vanden Plas model, complete with a ridiculous ornate radiator grille. To use another animal analogy, it only served to prove that although you can put lipstick on a pig, it’s still a pig.

NOT that the management had much else to do. British Leyland was effectively run by the unions, nowhere more aggressively than at Longbridge. The shop stewards’ negotiating committee — which if memory serves correctly boasted more than 120 members — was led by works’ convener Derek ‘Red Robbo’ Robinson.

Robbo was a Communist clown from central casting, a Brummie version of the stroppy Peter Sellers character in the satire I’m All Right Jack.

During one 12-month period in 1978-79, he was instrumental in 523 separate disputes, costing more than £200 million in lost production. Even that was a drop in the ocean of public money poured into the company by the government without any prospect of it ever turning a profit.

The Thatcher Cabinet decided to cut its losses by splitting up and privatising British Leyland, which at its peak employed around 150,000 people. The mass market Austin Morris division passed through several incarnations before ending up belonging to a Chinese corporation, which washed its hands of Longbridge in 2005.

Some parts — such as Jaguar, Land Rover and Mini — however, are all now thriving under private foreign ownership. It is worth reflecting that if they had remained in a nationalised British Leyland, preserved in aspic in 1979, they would have gone to the wall, too — but only after billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money had been tipped down the gurgler.

Yet that is the world to which Corbyn would return Britain, one in which politicians decide on investment plans, intervene in struggling companies and put workers (ie: shop stewards) on the board.

Red Robbo was eventually sacked when his own union tired of him, sick of the damage his campaign of strikes was inflicting on their members.

He’s now in his 80s and was last seen flogging the Communist Morning Star newspaper outside a funeral service in the Black Country.

Robbo’s Seventies spirit lives on in the ample shape of Len McCluskey, leader of Unite, which bankrolls the Corbynista project and helped fashion the Labour leader’s Life On Mars economic policies.

The Longbridge photos — which can be seen in full at Mail Online — are a haunting illustration of the consequences of throwing good money after bad, allowing industrial strategy to be dictated by Left-wing politicians and putting bolshie trades unionists in charge of commercial enterprises.

Back in the Seventies, Longbridge was a bustling factory employing 25,000 people. Well, I say ‘bustling’. Most of the time it was at a complete standstill, either as a result of yet another wildcat strike or because the ‘workers’ simply couldn’t be bothered to do any work.

There was one famous Evening Mail front page which featured pictures of workers fast asleep on the production line, taken by a photographer who had sneaked in during the night shift. The staff were camped out on the back seats of cars they were supposed to be assembling. They’d even taken their own pillows and blankets. Apparently, this was par for the course.

THE unions ruled the roost and employees could behave pretty much as they liked. Any attempt to discipline them would inevitably result in an immediate walk- out, so the managers didn’t bother.

Industrial anarchy, idleness and pilfering were the order of the day. We bought our house in Birmingham from a man who worked in the body shop and had decorated the place with paint he’d liberated from work. When we moved in, it had a British Racing Green cloakroom and one of the walls in the kitchen was a fetching metallic brown colour, from the Morris Marina range.

Here’s another story which still makes me smile. I took a phone call one day from an agitated reader who had just bought a new Rover.

He’d only had the car a week and all the paint was falling off. The dealership didn’t want to know. He’d been driving it, hadn’t he?

Could I help? Rather than write the story and get inundated with calls from thousands of other disgruntled owners, I rang a mate in the Press office and asked him to sort it out.

A couple of weeks later the chap with the Rover called back to thank me. They’d taken in his car for a complete respray and given him a loaner while it was being repaired. ‘So everything’s fine?’ I said. ‘Up to a point,’ he replied. ‘What do you mean, up to a point?’ ‘Well, the paintwork’s great, but while the car was in the factory, somebody nicked the stereo.’