In November, the owner of the British car company Vauxhall announced the closure of its van plant in Luton, putting 1,100 jobs at risk. The closure puts the Bedfordshire town on the frontline for the industrial green transition, against corporate profiteering and the growing far right. The government abandons Luton at its peril.
The closure of Vauxhall Luton would end 120 years of vehicle production at the very moment the plant stands ready to produce electric vans. This is a direct result of a failed profiteering strategy by Stellantis, the Italian-American multinational that owns Vauxhall, as the industry uses worker precarity as a weapon to maintain profit against changing technologies and new competition from China.
Stellantis is a global giant incorporating Vauxhall, Peugeot, Citroen, Fiat and Jeep among others. Under the recently ousted CEO Carlos Tavares, Stellantis operated less like a car company and more as a ruthlessly single-minded machine for extracting shareholder returns. It just happened to use cars for the purpose.
Under Tavares, Stellantis and much of the industry pivoted away from a traditional model of producing vehicles at large volume, reliant on high sales and economies of scale for profit. Instead, factories focused on more expensive models, prioritising revenue over volume. The result was spare capacity in European and UK car plants which the companies could target for cost cutting.
This accelerated following Covid-19 when demand for cars far exceeded supply. The industry-wide result was price hiking despite the cost-cutting. This is one reason why the prices of electric vehicles have risen by 11% since 2020 despite manufacturing costs coming down. People are being priced out of purchasing electric vehicles and this holds back demand, with the UK market share for electric cars standing at 19.6% and vans at only 6.2%. A stalling market in turn impacts production with workers paying for the stalled transition with their jobs.
For workers, gone are the days when work within a major plant means expectations of a job for life. As car companies have grown through mergers, each plant finds itself in continuous competition for investment against sister plants within the same multinational. What’s more, over 30 years’ work has been fragmented through agency labour, the outsourcing of sub-assembly and logistics, and component supply chains which stretch internationally. In this context of precarity, the current crisis of low electric vehicle demand and underutilisation across Europe has led to the threatened closure of the plant in Luton.
The planned closure is a betrayal. In 2023, Stellantis said that if workers hit targets, the company would bring electric van production to Luton. Workers met the targets and Stellantis announced the closure anyway. Announcing closure is a repetition of the company’s behaviour in Detroit, Michigan, USA. There, it took an industrial dispute by the United Auto Workers trade union to force Stellantis to keep its promises and commit to billions of dollars of investment.
Opening the door for the far right.
Beyond the sewing machinists of the Made in Dagenham strike of 1968, the car industry has largely vanished from the imagination of the left. In the militant heydays of the 1960s and 1970s convenors at the giant car plants of Longbridge, Cowley, Halewood or Dagenham would be headline-capturing names.
It remains difficult to imagine a job more evocative of a Marxist understanding of work and alienation than the assembly line which never stops. They may be reduced in number, but these great airport-sized factories – and their working-class cultures built up over generations – stand as besieged bastions of collective identity in a labour market defined by precarity.
This has not gone unnoticed by the far right. In Germany, the AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) have long sought to weaponise the insecurity faced by auto workers, now accelerating with recent threats to several Volkswagen plants. Through the front campaign “Zentrum Automobil”, the far right has contested elections for works council seats within major plants at BMW, Daimler and VW. Through this strategy the far right presents itself and its anti-net-zero arguments as an alternative to the established trade union in order to build a base among industrial workers.
In the UK, far-right infiltration is not as overt or structured, but the transformation of the industry from one of security to precarity creates the ideal conditions. In 2022, a report from Unite’s Organising Department exposed how far-right narratives spread online had infiltrated automotive plants in Sussex, leading them to distrust the union. This disaffection had a material basis, however, as workers at these plants earned £10,000 less than comparable workers – a gap which has since been closed following a successful union campaign.
As TUC research has shown, conspiracy theories and get-rich crypto schemes act as gateways for engagement with far more virulent narratives, funnelling people further rightward. Where these ideas have taken root, the proven antidote has been aggressive union organising with unapologetic narratives exposing profiteering. This rebuilds and re-legitimises the ideas of collectivism and trade unionism. There is much to learn from the 1970’s heyday yet.
Luton is not only where the English Defence League was founded by Stephen Yaxley-Lennon AKA Tommy Robinson, but was the one-time home of online misogynist Andrew Tate. For years the shop stewards at Vauxhall have been active in anti-far-right work, within both the plant and community. The end of Vauxhall means not only the unemployment of 1,100 workers, but the end of any real prospect for job security and collective identity that the plant has represented for generations.
It is a grim irony then that when it comes to intervention the UK government is being outflanked by Italy’s far-right prime minister Giorgia Meloni government. Following the first national auto workers strike in 20 years, the Italian government and Stellantis reached a deal to keep all Fiat plants open. This has included investment in the supply chain, but also the use of furlough to keep plants alive as production falls to levels below the 1950s.
Will the government act?
Through mass meetings and a two-day “continuous protest” at the factory gates in December, workers have shown their resolve to fight against this closure. Will the government now act? Local support from Labour MPs and councillors has been total, with both MPs (Sarah Owen and Rachel Hopkins) joining the protests, raising questions in the Commons and actively lobbying ministers.
Unite shop stewards have tabled a series of counterproposals as part of the ongoing consultation with the company and a delegation from the plant met with business ministers Jonathan Reynolds and Sarah Jones to call for emergency intervention.
Vauxhall closed its Luton car plant in 2000 under the previous Labour government. Labour cannot fail Luton again. The problems of the car industry – like oil or steel – are complex, but the government’s “north star” must be securing green jobs, pushing back on profiteers and refusing to abandon industrial workers to the waiting far right. As goes Luton, so goes the UK.