Rishi Sunak is lying about the UK car industry

If Britain is such a great place to build cars, why does Rishi Sunak need to bribe manufacturers with public cash to stay here?

Rishi Sunak has been crowing that the UK is supposedly "the best place to build the cars of the future" after handing BMW £75 million in subsidies to keep part of their Mini production in the UK.

The obvious question that springs to mind is why the UK government needs to bribe car manufacturers like BMW to stay here if Britain is actually "the best place" to build cars, but the problems run a lot deeper than that.

How did one of Britain’s most iconic car marques end up in the hands of the German company BMW when it used to be part of Britain’s publicly owned car company British Leyland?

The answer is that the Tory government of the 1980s refused to invest in British Leyland, then flogged it off to the private sector, after which it was repeatedly downscaled and asset stripped by a succession of private owners, until the last remnants (MG Rover Group) went bust in 2005.

BMW were one of the succession of private owners, but they decided to keep Mini for themselves when they split up and flogged off the rest of the company.

So we’ve gone from a Tory government refusing to invest in the national publicly owned car company, to a Tory government heavily subsidising the private owners of one of the last surviving remnants of the company they refused to back.

They’d rather flog off the national car company than invest in it, but they’ll pour public cash into a private car company and boast about how wonderful it is that they’re doing so!

One of the main reasons the Tory government has been backed into a corner and forced to bribe BMW into staying is the astonishing rise of the Chinese car industry, which has come out of nowhere to overtake Japan as the world’s biggest car exporter.

Just three years ago Chinese car exports were an eighth of the size of Japan’s, and their car export market was smaller than countries like Sweden, Hungary, and Czechia.

BMW has already shifted a load of Mini production to China, and Sunak’s bribe is clearly aimed at stopping them from closing the Cowley plant in Oxfordshire and shifting production to China.

As part of the deal the Mini plant will be using Chinese technology, which the Tory business secretary Kemi Badenoch explained away by saying "At the moment, China is leading this technology, we wouldn’t be able to get to where we want to on net zero by stopping or banning Chinese products, that’s certainly not where we are on it".

She makes no attempt to explain why China has come out of nowhere to become the world’s biggest car exporter and the world leader in electric car technology, it’s just stated as fact, and left unquestioned by most of Britain’s lazy and servile media class.

The biggest car manufacturer in China is the state-owned company SAIC (which owns MG, which is another fragment of Britain’s once mighty British Leyland group) and the next four biggest Chinese car producers (Dongfeng, FAW, Chang’an, and BAIC) are also state owned too.

Even the smallest of the top five Chinese car manufacturers produces four times as many vehicles as the entire UK car industry, which puts Rishi Sunak’s ridiculous boasts about the UK being the "best place" for car manufacturing into some actual perspective.

Despite significant population growth and soaring rates of car ownership, the UK car industry has declined from producing over 2million vehicles per year in 1970, to just over 800,000 in 2022.

Meanwhile China’s largely publicly owned car industry has expanded so rapidly that even their fifth biggest car manufacturer produces more vehicles per year than the entire UK car industry ever has in its history.

Being left behind in terms of volume isn’t such a huge surprise given China’s enormous population, but being left miles behind in terms of technology is a real kicker, because it illustrates the difference between a country that invests in their car industry, and a country that flogs their car industry off to asset strippers.

Things are now so bad that the Chinese electric car manufacturer BYD said that Britain is not even in their top 10 locations for a new car plant in Europe because of Brexit.

We’re not just being left behind by other countries in terms of volume and technology, the Brexit economic sanctions we’ve applied to ourselves have made us one of the least desirable places for car producers to establish themselves.

So after decades of underinvestment and private ownership we’re left in the position where we have to bribe a German car manufacturer just to keep building Minis here, using technology imported from China, and somehow Rishi Sunak and the Tories want us to believe that this is some kind of magnificent success story!

And the sad thing is that some people are actually gullible enough to believe it!