Mick

iTrader: (1)

The U.K. Independence Party has said that the 6,000 men and women who would lose their jobs at Rover were ‘victims of EU legislation’.

UKIP Leader Roger Knapman MEP said that the wrangle over EU state aid rules meant the company’s rescue plan simply ran out of time.

“These men and women are victims of EU legislation,” said Mr Knapman, “The reality is that we pay over £30m per day to the EU, most of which is squandered in waste and corruption, and Rover needed £100m to survive.

“Would British taxpayers rather pay £100m to Brussels over the next 3 days, or save the jobs of 6,000 British workers?

“It seems the government would rather sacrifice one of the great names of British manufacturing than offend its EU partners, who had no such problems when Renault needed bailing out.”

Mick

unclebuck

Brendan Hughes

Volkswagen seemed to manage OK.

Iain Young

Rover has been going down the tube for a lot longer than the last few weeks, mainly due to mismanagement and innefficiency. Throwing 100m of taxpayers money at it is not going to solve the problem, and I don't think that our money should be spent to bolster up a failing public / private company regardless of the potential costs. What happens when that money runs out, they'll only want more.

If the government is to spend our money on this (with little hope of getting it back), then the government should nationalise the company and make it a state run business.

Also, say the Chinese do buy the company. How long before they realise that it'll cost a fraction of the money to make them in China and export them rather than make them in an (alledgedly) innefficient plant in the uk. I suspect all those jobs will end up going anyway.

I think the government could help negotiations, but otherwise should steer well clear.

The interesting thing is that Labour are getting slated over this, but in fact they are handling the situation much better than the tories handled the decline of the mining industry a few years back. What short memories people have

Brendan Hughes

I think there are some more excuses in here somewhere...





...if they just keep scraping.

Markus

Rover is dead, it should not be bolstered by taxpayers money. It is sad that 6,000 will not have a job, but that is, unfortunately, the way life goes. Instead of protesting at downing street, maybe the wives of the rover workers should help their partners out by looking through job adverts for them whilst they are at work, rather than trying to force the government to put *our* money into a failed company.

Buckrogers

Spot on.

The company has failed over the last five years. If more of OUR money is to be put in then the sacking of the P4 is a must.

Adrian F

Unclebuck excellent Picture

Jye

Most of the to$$ers on here wont gaf m8, as it's not affecting them personally. If it was, and it was their families etc, well diff story of course. Same ol’ SN same ol’. aka the nimby so **** em all attitute. I hardly think this is the fault of any of the individual joe rover workers who I feel for.

Flatcapdriver

Iain, the problem is and has probably already been mentioned on here before is that Rover has already sold the rights to the K series engines, the 25 and 75 so there is bugger all left to sell, other than a production line and some spare parts so it's a mystery to me why HMG and others are shocked that the Chinese pulled out of negotiations.

Without getting into a debate about Tory/Labour policy don't forget that it was Labour who stupidly backed John Towers' bid in the first place, not to mention Hewitt's (who is so clearly out of her depth) announcing that the "receivers" had been called in before MG Rover had had a chance to do so.

And for all of you who still believe that the British car manufacturing industry is dead/crap/mismanaged or whatever don't forget that the UK exports more cars than any other European country and has some of the highest productivity figures in the industry.

Rover is a sad situation but if BMW had carried on, just imagine what contribution the MINI (largely developed by Rover engineers) would have done to the bottom line...

SiDHEaD

Good they waste enoug of our money without giving it to a company which is failing because their product simply wasn't good enough.

chris's scooby

And there was most of the country thinking that Rover were failing just because of a very poor and dated product range that not enough people wanted to spend their hard earned cash on.

Yes it is a shame that 6000 people will be out of work but no sadder than if it was 600 or 60000. It was a private company, why should the government have to foot the bill to bail them out. This time...

Why should yours and my tax payers money be spent on it. I'm sure there's a few hospitals that could use the money. Or some school dinners to improve...

I'm afraid part of the reason this has come to light in the way it has is just for political point scoring.

And the families marching to Downing Street is also wrong. Very sad to see but people are made redundent every day when companies close down, why should Rover be any different?

mart360

many people predicted this would happen 5 years ago and were rubbished as being negative and unsupportive.

its easy to cast aspertions and blame the p4 .. but lets be honest...

mismangement, working practices, outmoded union systems , failure to move with the times, poor vehicles and pricing, didnt help. the company was and is so big it dosent know its **** from its elbow.

what it needed was a bloody big shake up, unfortunatly the powers that be at the time it was needed didnt help. did they billy!!!

how many times did you hear over the last 5 years that the unions were in negotiation over pay or other things at mgR.. given the thin ice they were on, you would have thought that they would ALL (management included) have pulled out the stops to make it a going concern.

change was never there forte!!

M

Shark Man

Granted you may have a point. But surely anyone who worked at Rover should have the common sense to know they were on borrowed time, the bail out 5 years ago by BMW was a good warning shot.

I know two people who took redundancy offers from Rover well before this, they are glad they took it back then...they are even more glad now after the current saga.

As cold hearted it is to say it, but anyone who thought they had a "job for life" at Rover are disillusioned to say the least. Perhaps the Phoenix 4 were responsible for kidding these simple minded folk into thinking they had a nice long rosy future. I doubt it, most people with a hint of initiative would know their days are numbered....until the next buy out, which may or may not happen....thats the gamble.

Just this time, no buy out happened.

r32

Its failing because of severely dated products. When BMW took over they already knew they were going to either select what they wanted to keep, sell the rest off, eg. Land ROver to Ford after having picked up tasty morsels like hill decent, then junk the rest. They actually stopped work on new models other than the Mini. They can be partly blamed forthe current situation. The new Astra cost 1.2 billion to develop and the Phoenix group never had a chance of developing new ranges. So they just MG tarted up old cars and sold those. Meanwhile hiving off anything of value, like the plant, the land, the K series engine, the rights to some models, some names, and the whole spares business. All just to raise cash in the short term. The long term was sadly never in question .... it was bound to go under sooner or later.
All of this doesnt make it any less tragic for the work force and those at supplying companies, its just so sad for them.

Geezer

Whilst I have every sympathy for the families involved, I don;t really see a way for anything other than closure. The taxpayer cannot prop up a company that is losing £25 million a month when it does not have a product available to recover.

Even if the govt shoved hundreds of millions their way, it is not enough to develop new models which people actually want to buy.

It's only the size of the company and the fact that it is our last volume car maker that have stirred up public interest. I would imagine a similar amount of jobs go every week in the country spread over lots of companies due to similar problems, but no one screams for money to bolster them up.

Geezer

OllyK

We don't "GAF" - because many of us have been through the same thing but made provision for a rainy day by taking out redundancy cover. These people work for a private firm not a public one, it is down to them and their employer to sort it out, it is not down to the governement to bail them out. Considering how up and down Rover have been over the years, you'd have to be a damn fool not to have taken out some kind of insurance or have kept some savings to one side. Take responsibility for yourself!