British Leyland was the UK's car champion — strikes, poor quality and £3B killed it

British Leyland was created on 17 January 1968 by merging British Motor Holdings and Leyland Motor Corporation — a forced marriage encouraged by Tony Benn's Industrial Reorganisation Committee. The new company was the world's fifth-largest vehicle manufacturer, with 40% of the UK car market, almost 40 factories, and 250,000 employees. Its brands included Austin, Morris, MG, Jaguar, Rover, Triumph, Land Rover, Mini, and dozens more — a sprawling collection of competing marques with overlapping products and no shared engineering.

The problems were immediate and structural. BL's brands competed against each other for the same customers. Its plants were ancient and inefficient; a strike at one parts factory could shut down the entire company. The Morris Marina (1971) and Austin Allegro (1973) were badly designed, poorly built, and quickly developed reputations that poisoned the entire brand. Warranty costs on existing models were crippling. By the end of 1974, the company was on the brink of bankruptcy. The Labour government nationalized it in 1975 and invested over £3 billion in a hopeless rescue attempt.

Michael Edwardes was appointed CEO in 1977 and made progress — he sacked the chief shop steward, closed MG and Triumph factories, and launched the Austin Metro and a Honda alliance. But the structural rot was too deep. Jaguar was privatized in 1984. The remains — branded as Rover Group — were sold to British Aerospace in 1988, then to BMW in 1994. BMW broke it up in 2000: Mini stayed with BMW, Land Rover went to Ford, and the volume car business — MG Rover — went into administration in 2005. The brands ended up in Chinese and Indian hands.