When Yu Jian Wei, chief executive of Nanjing Automobile Corporation, symbolically reopened an assembly line at Longbridge on Tuesday, he described the plant as “the spiritual home of the UK motor industry”. Unfortunately, he was right.

Herbert Austin, who had created the first proper all-British car in 1900, started the factory five years later on the site of a derelict printing works. He worked in the old works’ front office and lived within sight of the plant for the next 36 years. By the time that the final, barrel-scraping attempt to keep Longbridge as a British-owned carmaker failed two years ago, it was the last of its kind.

In between, its fortunes reflected the hopes, triumphs and mistakes of the industry. Once it helped to make Britain the world’s leading car exporter, but it left the UK as the only leading European economy without a significant domestic motor manufacturer.

After great early success, Austin faced insolvency in 1921 after war work ended overnight. He kept the factory going by making a deal with employees. If they worked for a month without pay, they would be offered jobs for life.

This promise could have been a burden, but had largely positive effects. After flirting with a sale to General Motors, he made Longbridge the independent British version of Ford, keeping costs down by churning out a narrow range of attractive cars in a single plant at low prices to capture economies of scale. When this practical visionary died during the Second World War, he seemed to have succeeded.

However, the worm was about to enter Longbridge. Power and influence was given to shop stewards in wartime “joint production committees” to boost war output by involving workers. A generation later, the shop stewards’ movement was to foment noncooperation, disruption and constant labour disputes, perhaps because its positive wartime role was taken away. It did not help that Austin, and then BMC, the merger of Austin with its arch-rival Morris, were run by the unsympathetic Leonard Lord, a hard-driving, foul-mouthed production man.

How different things might have been if Austin and the wealthier William Morris, who were both socially aware, had left their stakes in trust for employees instead of leaving their money to charity.

Another wartime emergency measure, the 1941 Coventry Tool Room Agreement, which laid down pay differentials for the next 30 years, inspired many disputes when skills were in short supply. Britain had a free rein in postwar export markets and the Government, desperate for dollars, enforced a 75 per cent export quota. UK buyers had to wait months or years. The entire focus was on maximising output from limited capacity, regardless of quality, let alone planning, design and engineering.

By 1955, when Lord showed the Duke of Edinburgh the company’s models, the Duke suggested with characteristic frankness that Lord should rethink them because “I am not sure these are up to the foreign competition”. The Mini was developed four years later but lost money because it was too complicated to make cheaply. Lord’s lack of vision and the inadequacy of George Harriman, his protégé and successor, could have crippled any large business, let alone one about to be hit by French, German and Japanese rivals.

In 1952, they had no idea how to merge Austin and Morris into a stronger British Motor Corporation. BMC had five car marques, keeping production and marketing costs high, dissipating cashflow and starving investment in capacity, design and quality engineering. When Harold Wilson bullied the Leyland truck and bus group into taking over the wallowing hulk in 1968, the merged British Leyland had nine car marques.

Any hope of competing in the world market as a volume producer had realistically gone already. BL had plenty of potential winners, including the Mini, Jaguar, MG and Triumph sports cars, lorry and bus businesses and Land Rover. But even after the State bailed out the bloated group less than a decade later, these business were starved of resources and effort and eventually sacrificed to keep the Longbridge dream going.

Between 1968 and 1976, this plant and the Midlands in general was the chosen battleground for the revolutionary Left, spreading the message of eternal conflict between management and workers. Communist Party records show that it had 20 shop stewards conspiring together at Longbridge under Derek Robinson, made notorious as Red Robbo.

In 1977, when Sir Michael Edwardes was brought in to save the group from closure, a sixth of potential output was lost through strikes. By the time that the militants were seen off, Longbridge had lost its mass market, though three more owners kept denying it until reality took over.

Without the 1952 merger of weakness, Longbridge might have survived. Without the merger with Leyland, much of the rest of the UK industry might have survived. Mergers rarely cure weakness.

Even so, Longbridge might have come through if we, as voters, consumers, politicians and employees, all determined that it should succeed. Renault was once no better. But we did not care enough, any more than we do today, as more successful British enterprises are being picked off one by one by the Red Robbos of the City investment banks.

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