From The Times
Nissan’s trouble in Sunderland should worry Labour strategists
Disaster is looming at Britain’s last big volume car manufacturer. If ministers aren’t preparing, their industrial strategy isn’t worth the name
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Tuesday August 26 2025, 10.25pm, The Times
Politics will always trump policy, the short-term imperative eclipsing the long-term strategic goal. Fifty years ago this autumn, the UK outpost of the American auto giant Chrysler was in crisis. The Wilson government of the mid-1970s, limping from predicament to calamity, nonetheless prided itself on having an industrial strategy that would determine policy decisions: the regeneration of British industry and enhancing economic performance was paramount, and no more supporting lame ducks.
But just as few military battleplans survive engagement with the enemy, so not many industrial strategies stand up to a looming catastrophe.
Chrysler’s Michigan headquarters decided to close its plants in the Midlands and near Glasgow. Despite the impending loss of thousands of jobs, ministers initially took a Darwinian view that there was no point intervening, especially on behalf of a US multinational.
Chrysler then hinted it may have a rescue plan. Wilson, with one eye on the rise of Scottish nationalism and the future of Scotland’s last car plant, and the other on his wafer-thin parliamentary majority, folded and ordered a Treasury-backed rescue. Industrial strategy was, after all, about backing lame ducks — as the subsequent demise of Chrysler UK testifies.
Fifty years later, two reasons can be given for the series of interventions by the latest Labour government in
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: ten years of Conservative governments putting off a reckoning on what the UK’s steel industry should look like; and a political landscape in which every industrial crisis risks being a gift to Reform UK.
Meanwhile, a cataclysm may be arriving on the horizon. The decline and possible fall of Nissan as an international automotive firm is playing out in plain sight.
Nissan’s
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is emblematic for the UK. It is the country’s last big volume car manufacturer, a totem for the transition to electric motoring and investment in gigafactories, the country’s largest single automotive plant, and it provides 7,000 jobs in the northeast, where it is the biggest private sector employer.
Nissan is regarded as having, in Sunderland, one of the best workforces in the world and a factory pre-eminent in productivity.
Yet the plant can’t afford its runaway energy bills nor its inflated labour costs, exacerbated by increases in employment taxes.
Nissan Sunderland may not yet become another Chrysler UK. But if Labour ministers are not preparing for the multiple what-ifs of a disaster in the northeast then their industrial strategy is not worth the ink and paper.
