The Austin Brexit

[David Stepney]

I am old enough to remember a time (before British Leyland) when British cars were  interesting and innovative and designed by engineers.  Once British Leyand was formed and Chrysler took over the Rootes group, it was the cost accountants who held the power. Once you start designing cars with pound or dollar signs infront of your eyes instead of engineering vision, then you get bland and boring cars, even if some of them were quite worthy. It was an inability to build anything other that bland,and boring cars that finally killed our indigenous motor industry. And all the jokes about Friday cars and reliability in general didn't help either. During the prewar period and up until the fifties (I suppose) we took pride in our industrial prowess. I recall seeing a prewar advert for some British car or other  where a smartly dressed woman was saying to her husband as they stood by their British car watching another couple arrive: " Oh Look Dear! They've come in a FOREIGN car!"

Alas this pride was replaced by a fashion of self deprecation from about the sixties onwards and, as a result we let our manufacturing base wither on the vine.