MG ends car production at Longbridge – not that MG actually built anything

MG has decided car production at the Longbridge Plant will end after more than a century, although the reality is actual car production ended when SAIC bought MG.

For those of us who are no longer as slim as we once were, and whose hair seems to recede and grey by the day. the Longbridge Plant in Birmingham is synonymous with all that was wrong with nationalised British Leyland (or by whichever moniker it was known in different periods).

So bad were labour relations at Longbridge, certainly through the 1970s, that news cameras were practically fixtures at the site as Red Robbo asked for a show of hands before the workforce withdrew their labour once again on yet another flimsy pretext (really, there were 100s of strikes a year).

But despite spending half their time on strike, the workforce – which numbered tens of thousands – did churn out more than 300,000 cars a year, perhaps most famously the Austin Metro for more than a decade.

But through the 1990s and beyond, as BL was privatised, BMW bought Rover and MG, then sold it on to Phoenix who lined their pockets and cocked everything up, the Longbridge plant was in severe decline.

In recent years what’s left of the Longbridge Plant – really, just the rump after much if it was flattened and re-developed – has been used by SAIC as the HQ for MG, with a pretence that MGs were still being built on the site, although in truth they were predominantly CKD from China just bolted together for the local market in the UK.

But now even that’s not going to happen, with all MG cars now being imported fully finished from China, and the Longbridge Plant finally ending its run of more than a century of car production.

But the fact that just 25 jobs will be lost at Longbridge as ‘production’ ends probably tells you all you need top know.