The incredibly arrogant and incompetent labor unions of that period did their very best to kill Jaguar just as they did all the other English marques

Doug... although I agree with the observed results, you have got the wrong track here. All you need to do is change two words {"Labour Unions"} for the correct one:

"Management"

There had to be some reason why the workers were revolting, you know...

How about:

- Low wages
- punitive working practices
- bad working conditions
- underinvestment in factories
- underinvestment in product development
- no market vision or research
- internicene wars between directors of different marque factory management teams
- duplication of model ranges
- model overpricing and low sales (that persist to this day)
- arrogance and ignorance in the face of market opinion (that persist to this day)
- monopolistic sales practices (that persist to this day)
- etc. etc. etc.

Wouldn't you be p****** off working in that sort of environment? Wouldn't your morale and productivity be pretty low in that situation?

It can all be boiled down to one thing: Total Managerial Incompetence.

You will note, I hope, the marques that did manage to survive the longest within the Leyland/BL combine disaster were (curiously) Rover, Triumph, Jaguar. Coincidence? Or was it because they were marques that always had a good product and decent management before the buyouts/mergers and the bloodletting in the boardrooms that followed?

One of the few remaining Mk1 owners... #00015