DEVELOPED NATIONS DON'T ASSEMBLE STUFF:

UK's MG Rover collapses, faces mass job losses (Michael Smith and Gerard Wynn, April 15, 2005, Reuters)

Bankrupt British carmaker MG Rover finally collapsed on Friday as administrators said there was no prospect of selling the business whole, dealing a blow to the ruling Labour Party as it campaigns for re-election.

Administrators PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), appointed last week after a rescue deal with China's Shanghai Automotive Industry Corp (SAIC) broke down, said there was no hope of saving the firm and that its 6,000 workers faced redundancy. [...]

The final collapse of MG Rover, which has been in its death throes for weeks, is politically embarrassing for the UK government which is campaigning on the back of its economic record to win re-election on May 5.

The government is defending a number of slim majorities in seats around MG Rover's main Longbridge plant in Birmingham, central England.

Ford and GM to follow shortly.

MORE:
MG Rover's collapse jolts British election: Britain's last major carmaker filed for a type of bankruptcy last week, putting pressure on Blair. (Mark Rice-Oxley, 4/15/05, The Christian Science Monitor)

No sooner had Prime Minister Tony Blair called Britain's election than the country was shaken by the dramatic collapse of one of its biggest industrial names.

The victim was MG Rover, which filed for bankruptcy last week after a takeover bid from a Chinese automaker foundered. The demise of Britain's last major domestic carmaker is a blow to its once-proud automobile sector, which has suffered assembly plant closures and surrendered major marques like Jaguar and Rolls Royce to overseas giants in recent years.

In political terms, it's as if General Motors went bust less than a month before a US presidential election. As many as 6,000 workers at the Longbridge plant in central England face imminent layoffs. And many more jobs in related industries are on the line. Locals say an entire region that would normally support Mr. Blair's Labour Party on the May 5 election is now in shock.

"It's devastating for the community," says Toni Round, whose partner Darren Doughty has worked at MG Rover for 16 years. "I don't think you can imagine how many people it's going to affect," she said at a rally by scores of family members of Rover workers outside Downing Street on Wednesday. "People are bitter, but they don't know who to blame," she adds.

"It's like a plane crash," says Nick Matthews, a local expert in the manufacturing sector. "It's all the people in the same place at the same time. That plant has been there since the 1890s."

Every hundred years or so the economy changes a little.

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 15, 2005 8:22 AM