THIRTY years ago, a Labour government would have faced a political, and probable electoral, disaster if the Longbridge plant had closed. Now, while the collapse of MG Rover will still be a severe embarrassment for the Government in the middle of an election campaign, the adverse consequences on May 5 will probably be limited.

The Cabinets of the 1970s and 1980s spent a long time agonising over the future of what was then British Leyland (BL), pouring in billions of pounds. Baroness Thatcher writes in her memoirs, The Downing Street Years, about the “appalling” economic implications of the threat of liquidation in 1979. “One hundred and fifty thousand people were employed by the company in the UK; there were perhaps an equal number of jobs in the component and other supplying industries dependent on BL”.

The company recurs throughout the book, notably the furious row of February 1986 over the future of Land Rover when Norman (now Lord) Fowler spoke “for Birmingham”. As Lady Thatcher noted acidly: “When the Norman Fowlers of this world believe they can afford to rebel, you know that things are bad.”

Now, the impact is more limited. MG Rover’s Longbridge plant is only one part of the old BL group: BMW is enjoying considerable success with the Mini at Cowley, while Ford is now producing Range Rovers. Just over 6,000 people are employed by MG Rover in the West Midlands, and suppliers of parts and components employ 20,000 workers, many of whom will lose their jobs. While this will obviously have a big impact, the numbers are a fraction of the totals lost from the old BL.

Not only do large redundancies by one company make a much larger public impact than a similar total of dismissals by several firms, but MG Rover and the motor industry have a big symbolic significance in Birmingham. They epitomise the West Midlands sense of itself as the heart of British manufacturing. Virtually all the seats where MG Rover workers live are Labour-held. But few are in the Tories’ top 50 targets.

Birmingham Northfield, the home of the plant, changed parties four times between 1979 and 1992, but was held in 2001 by Richard Burden with 56 per cent of the vote, against 30 per cent for the Tories. Most Birmingham MPs have had 20-point plus margins, apart from Edgbaston, where Gisela Stuart has a 12-point margin, and Yardley, where the departing Estelle Morris faced a strong Liberal Democrat challenge. Jacqui Smith, an Industry Minister in nearby Redditch, could be hit by any backlash since she has only a 6.7 point margin. But in the West Midlands there are no more than half a dozen Labour seats in the top 50 marginals.

The key question is who will voters blame? Before, and well into the Thatcher era, the answer would have been the Government, which was expected to provide subisidies. But attitudes have changed. Governments are no longer seen as the last-resort guarantor — Labour did not suffer from the big redundancies produced by the closure of semi-conductor companies in the late 1990s.

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