DAVE PHILLIPS

Broken politics and JLR

Ihave written before about my late father, who was brilliant at shooting down German aircraft but the world’s worst photographer. He did, however, come good once, in the summer of 1956, taking a well-exposed and in-focus snap of me as a baby in my pram. I’m sitting up and grinning while Mum’s standing and smiling proudly – possibly of me, but more likely the pram – huge, generously sprung and resembling a chrome-plated tank. That’s the pram, not Mum. They don’t build ’em like that any more. My very earliest memory is of being in that pram. Seriously. I clearly recall the joy of seeing the world from my elevated seating position. I can’t have been more than a year old, so it obviously left a huge impression on me and is probably why I later came to love Land Rovers so much. To the best of my recollection, however, in my all-too-brief period as a perambulator passenger I never encountered a politician.

I mention this because I was once approached at a Billing Show by a complete stranger who enquired whether, as a baby, I had been attacked in my pram by a rabid politician. How otherwise, he asked, could I have developed such an ingrained disdain of our esteemed leaders?

It was a question that made me smile. After all, here was a man who clearly read my column rather than turn the page to get to LRM’S oilier technical section. He was right about my disdain of politicians, but wrong as to how it came about. My cynicism for the self-serving scumbags developed during my teenage years, as a newspaper reporter. What you see when you glimpse behind the scenes of the political machine colours your thinking for life.

Have you ever noticed that people always apologise before they say “I told you so”? You know the sort of thing: “I hate to say I told you so, but . . .” when what they actually mean is: “I love to say I told you so, and . . .”

So please permit me just a hint of gloating when I mention the current political turmoil unfolding in this country. It underlines what I have been writing for years: that our witless politicians aren’t fit for purpose. Happily the rest of the country has cottoned on and given the two major parties a good kicking in the European elections, but that doesn’t solve the ongoing problem of a rudderless House of Commons in stormy waters, heading for the

rocks. We are in a mess with no apparent way out.

“What’s all this got to do with Land Rovers?” I can hear you ask. Well, quite a lot, actually. No industry in the western world has ever been so influenced by the machinations of government as the British car industry. And as Jaguar Land Rover is just about the last surviving fragment of that once-mighty industry, you can probably appreciate my concern.

The biggest shock wave to hit Land Rover recently is the recent decision to build the new Defender in Slovakia. Was that decision influenced by Britain’s political turmoil? Of course it was, but it’s not actually that simple. The main reason JLR is moving Defender production to Slovakia because it is cheaper to build cars there. They can pay a skilled Slovakian worker a fraction of what they would have to pay his or her British counterpart. That’s the bottom line.

The fact that Defender was built in Solihull, just like all its leaf-sprung predecessors, meant a lot to the reputation of the brand. Defender may not have been profitable, but it was the foundation of the company’s reputation for British-made ruggedness and reliability, upon which the highly-profitable Range Rover, Discovery and Freelander variants have always relied.

Will Made-in- Slovakia have the same cachet as Built-in- Solihull? Don’t bother answering that question, because we all know the answer.

If we had politicians worth their salt, they would have fought tooth and nail to keep Defender production in Britain. But they have shown in recent months that they care for nothing so much as their own selfish interests. Industry – that’s all industry, not just the motor industry – can go to hell in a handcart while they squabble and posture, pretending their fighting for ‘principles’ when they don’t even know what the word means.

But it’s not all bad news. The recurring theme of the last 70odd years is that Land Rover has survived all sorts of political incompetence by governments of all persuasions. Let’s just hope JLR bears that in mind before it gives up on Britain and ships the lot out to Slovakia.

“What you see when you glimpse behind the scenes of the political machine colours your thinking for life”

EX-LRM Editor Dave has driven Land Rovers in most corners of the world, but loves the British countryside best