Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [72]
Instead, I delivered a rather different and possibly less welcome message to the motor industry. I acknowledged that some of the problems they faced were caused by the world recession. But that was not the real reason for the industry’s difficulties. I said:
This year we have the lowest car production for twenty years. Not because home sales are the lowest — far from it. But because people are buying foreign cars rather than our own. And some of those come from high-wage, high-exchange-rate economies. The world recession may have exacerbated our problems, but it is not the root cause in the motor industry. What has happened to the motor industry since the 1950s exemplifies what has been going wrong in too many other parts of British industry: higher pay not matched by higher productivity; low profits, so low investment; too little going into R & D and new design … and why haven’t we had the productivity? Overmanning. Resistance to change. Too many strikes and stoppages.
The last part of that message seemed to fall on deaf ears. On 27 October BL’s trade unions decided overwhelmingly to reject the company’s offer of a pay increase of 6.8 per cent and recommended a strike. Michael Edwardes wrote to Keith Joseph to say that a strike would make it impossible to achieve the 1981 Corporate Plan submitted just a week before. To win support for the pay offer, he wanted to write to inform union officials of the key aspects of the 1981 Plan, including the funds required for 1981 and 1982 — a figure which he would put at £800 million. I reluctantly accepted Michael Edwardes’s approach but only on the clear understanding that the Department of Industry would make it known that the Government was not committed in any way to finding these funds and that the matter had yet to be considered. In fact, on 18 November BL’s union representatives backed down and finally decided to accept the company’s offer. History repeated itself: almost the same thing had happened the previous year. The need to deal with an industrial relations crisis made it extremely difficult to avoid the impression that we were prepared to provide large amounts of extra public funding for the company. No matter how clear our disclaimers, inevitably people drew that conclusion.
On any rational commercial judgement, there were no good reasons for continuing to fund British Leyland. The 1980 Corporate Plan had foreseen the need for about £130 million of new government equity in the period of 1981 and beyond. In the 1981 Plan which we were now asked to approve that sum had grown by £1 billion. Meanwhile, the outlook for profits was worse. The predictions for market share in successive Plans had grown ever gloomier. Many of BL’s models were uncompetitive. The Metro and the BL/Honda Bounty would help, but neither would yield much in profits. BL was still a high-cost, low-volume manufacturer of cars in a world where low cost and high volume were essential for success.
On 12 January I held a meeting at No. 10 to discuss the Corporate Plan with Keith Joseph, Geoffrey Howe, Norman Tebbit and others. I continued to argue that we should try to find some middle way between total closure and fully funding the Corporate Plan.
I knew that closure of the volume car business, with all that would mean for the West Midlands and the Oxford area, would not be politically acceptable to the Cabinet or the Party, at least in the short term. It would also be a huge cost to the Exchequer — perhaps not very different to the sort of sums BL was now seeking. I told a meeting of ministers on 16 January that the Government must get rid of its financial liability for the volume car business in a way which was both humane and politically acceptable. We might need to pay a