Nationalisation is bad for America, and it is bad for Britain. Why would you want to when there are too many cars being made around the world anyway?

More importantly why would you want to when the cars that Vauxhall make are so appalling bad compared to Honda and Toyota?

There is overcapacity in the car industry and too many people working in it. Something has to give way.

Nationalise if you want to – but do so only from a commercially viable standpoint. If the business was viable, then it would be snapped up by someone wanting to buy it.

Indeed, if the unions are so convinced the business could be saved, why don’t they put their money where their mouth is for once, and buy the company?

More importantly why would you want to when the cars that Vauxhall make are so appalling bad compared to Honda and Toyota?

This is a good point.

But I think it would be good to do a proper cost-benefit analysis and see whether the impact on the local economy and the multiplier effect will be more than the actual short term cost of saving those jobs.

Over the longer term, no doubt Vauxhall will have to shape up, or perhaps be sold to a Japanese / South Korean company.

Hahahahahaha! You won’t buy our s*** cars so we’ll make you pay for them through your taxes anyway, hahahahahaha!!!!!

Just another example of the idocy of not having a state run health care system. That is what did for GM and it will do for many other American corporations as well. Take away corporate funded health care of employees and most Americans will be in the shit regards medical treatment.

Nationalise it, then put 51% of the stock into a trust, give each Vauxhaul worker, part and full time, a single, equal vote on how that trust runs, or selects the management to run, the company. Vauxhall can then sink or swim on the merits of its workers, their hard work and their judgement.

The remaining 49%can be sold off by the government over time to reclaim some of its investment and will be more than enough for speculative investment capital, and I doubt that the new management would take excessive bonuses or run the company into the ground like the former management or worse the vulture capitalists that destroyed Rover.

I don’t understand how you can write about the importance of fighting back, without giving some sense of what you think you are fighting back against or exactly what you are fighting for.

If you believe that somehow Vauxhall can become a profitable business then fine, it makes some sense to say it’s important to fight back. In that case, I suppose what you are fighting for is to trade some of those future profits for higher employment now – that is, to get the level of employment higher than management would otherwise choose, so all your are fighting against is investor’s desire to maximise their profits.

Perhaps you think that the future profitability of Vauxhall is a realistic prospect, and in normal times the private sector would stump up the investment needed to achieve those future profits, but because of all that’s going on, the private sector doesn’t feel like doing that right now, so by persuading the govt to do so, you see yourselves as making good a private market failure.

Dave, are you taking it for granted that Vauxhall could be returned to profitability, or is that the ‘market logic’ you reject?

If however Vauxhall stands no realistic chance of becoming a profitable business, what are you fighting for/against? Unless you can coerce them, there’s no point in ‘fighting’ private investors, in the hope of persuading them to stump up money they will then lose. It only makes sense to ‘fight’ the government, so that it agrees to put up some subsidies to keep things afloat. But is that really what socialists fight for? Even in an ideal socialist run economy, resources will need reallocating and employment will be reduced in some activities for time to time. How do we know this isn’t one such situation? It’s all very well talking about ‘multipliers’, the short-run consequences of job losses, but there are long-run ‘multipliers’ involved in deciding to subsidise loss-making activities. Does rejecting market logic involve rejecting the idea that things should cost less to produce than they’re sold for? In a socialist world, would we see X amount of resources expended to produce things that consumers only value at x<X? Perhaps you think that in certain sectors, a socialist government would choose do destroy economic value over the long-run in order to achieve some welfare objective, (obviously that entails surpluses being produced elsewhere in the economy) – is this what rejecting market logic means? Do you think car production in the UK should receive long-run subsidisation from the tax payer?

I’m not saying there isn’t a case for asking the government to fund taking Vauxhall into workers control (whatever that means) but I think the case needs fleshing out in the specific instance of Vauxhall, rather than urging us to fight for it on general principle.

Or perhaps you are reconciled to job losses and are just fighting for better terms for the redundancies, or you just want to defer them until the economy strengthens? These look like sensible objectives to me, too.

A shorter version of my comment above might be: if the quesiton is “when should the left wing fight against job cuts” the answer is not “always”. What is it about Vauxhall that means job cuts should be fought in this case?

Nice to see that the Trade Unions and various people involved with Vauxhall understand that nationalisation would be the usual disaster.

Pity the same can’t be said about bloggers.

General Motors produced a cartoon version of F A Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. Amusing to see a company that once denounced state intervention in the economy as a route to Stalinist tyranny now getting State handouts of $19 billion with the prospect of a further $30 billion to come.

Dave, why do you make this very good suggestion:

why not press the political case that Vauxhall and other companies that would otherwise go bust be taken into social ownership under workers’ control?

In a post talking about nationalisation? You’re not actually suggesting nationalisation, you’re suggesting something else entirely.

It’s my understanding, and I will happily be corrected if I’m wrong, that Vauxhall is a profitable company on its own. Jennie assures me the reasons people buy Corsa’s is because they’re crap, but cheap crap, and many people that want a supermini can’t afford a good supermini.

If Vauxhall has a decent niche but the parent company has problems caused in its home market that don’t affect Vauxhall, then capital should be raised somehow to allow Vauxhall to be established as a separate firm, but one most certainly not under state control.

Nationalisation would be pointless, but unless I’m misreading you’re actually proposing a fairly liberal solution (one straight out the JS Mill playbook in fact). So why muddy the waters by titling the post nationalisation?

Matt – I am heartened to hear that Vauxhall is profitable in its own right – if so, the problem of how to keep the business going and protect jobs ought to be relatively easy to solve. Could Vauxhall be profitable as a seperate entity from Opel, or are we talking about some sort of partnership between a UK worker owned business, and Opel?

Luis, I don’t know for a fact that it is (and it’s possible that it may’ve been up to the recent difficulties across the board but currently isn’t), I think I heard it said in a news report but can’t source it, hence my “happy to be corrected” stance.

Details, I’m afraid, I care little about—as a Millian liberal I’m rather keen on employee ownership schemes generally and cooperatives and partnerships as specifics, Dave’s proposal of that (coming from an unexpected source) caught my eye is all.

(worth noting that 10% of the stake in the combined company is going to be owned by the German Opal workers as part of the German Govt guarantees, which I thought fairly interesting).

“”"why not press the political case that Vauxhall and other companies that would otherwise go bust be taken into social ownership under workers’ control?”"”

I don’t have problem with workers control of Vauxhall, but “social ownership” here sounds like code for the taxpayer will subsidise the company like throwing money into a bottomless pit.

If Vauxhall cannot sell cars for more than the cost of inputs to making those cars, then they are producing negative wealth, and should no more be subsidised than someone throwing bricks through windows should be.

So paying the top executives 500 times what the average employee gets didn’t work out so well for the company. Just like various banks. Strange, I thought wing nut logic is that we have to pay these huge salaries to get the best people.

Perhaps you don’t get the best people after all, just the most greedy bastards who are only interested in themselves.

“why not press the political case that Vauxhall and other companies that would otherwise go bust be taken into social ownership under workers’ control?”

If the workers want to buy the company then by all means….hang on, you don’t mean buy do you? You mean thieve directly or steal from the rest of us to pay for it.

I think we should nationalise Austin, Rover, Triumph, MG and Hillman too.

Look at all the jobs we would have.

Oh yes and Woolworths.

Sure, a serious response to what is happening right now will inevitably involve countering market logic, and with almost no exceptions, unions seem to have long ago lost the imagination necessary to do that.

The loss of imagination pre-dates “what is happening right now “. Britain has had no independent car manufacturing concerns since Rover was sold to the Germans. I recall Will Hutton banging on about it at the time. Did you? And if so, can you provide a link to something you wrote about the subject at the time? If not, file yourself under, “Too late, too late…”

Social ownership under workers’ control – no thanks.

Workers’ ownership – absolutely: go for it.

@16 If Vauxhall cannot sell cars for more than the cost of inputs to making those cars, then they are producing negative wealth, and should no more be subsidised than someone throwing bricks through windows should be.

Indeed. So the key question is whether Vauxhall is or can become, on average through an economic cycle, a profitable business. You can attempt to “counter market logic” all you like, but if the answer to that question is “no”, then the company will ultimately fail. Better then not to have wasted billions beforehand.

And what is good for General Motors these days is de facto nationalisation.

Is there any truth in the rumour that it will be renamed American Leyland?