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Amazing renaissance of UK car making continues

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Manufacturing is still down in the dumps – it would be surprising if it were not, considering the state of the eurozone – but the amazing renaissance of UK car making has not faltered.

Land Rover, under its Indian owner Tata, has posted the highest monthly sales in its 65-year history, thanks to the popularity of Range Rovers and Freelanders with wealthy buyers here and overseas.

The car industry is one of the few bright spots for UK manufacturing exports and for inward investment.

Best of British: The car industry is one of the few bright spots for UK manufacturing exports and for inward investment

In the domestic market, industry body the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders has just reported an increase in sales of nearly 6 per cent – an encouraging sign consumer confidence may be returning, despite the gloomy news from much of the High Street.

This comes as some of the continent’s biggest car makers, outside Germany, are struggling.

Fiat has been kyboshed by the political instability in its home country of Italy and has seen its market value trail off from around €22bn in 2007 before the financial crisis to just over €5bn.

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French giant PSI Peugeot Citroen reported a €5bn loss, its biggest ever, as it grapples with moribund sales in southern Europe and the bungling of socialist president Francois Hollande.

The success of our car industry is a potent mix of enlightened long term foreign investment and British elan. Long may it continue.

Pass the Salz

The Anthony Salz probe into Barclays’ ethical shortcomings cost nearly £18m – or about a year’s earnings for Bob Diamond – but was as effective as a wet fish.

We already knew Barclays had descended from a reputable and trusted institution into a ravenous shark-pool. We already knew that the dominant investment banking culture had tainted the entire organisation, turning much of it greedy, reckless and aggressive.

 

Unlike the parliamentary banking commission’s report into HBOS, the inquiry into Barclays did not recommend the bank’s top three – former chairman Marcus Agius or chief executives John Varley and Bob Diamond – should be banned from the City.

But what Salz really should have said is that the structure of the bank needs to change before the culture will.

It was the rise of the investment banking culture that gave rise to the pay excesses. As Salz notes, during 2010 and 2011, £6bn was paid out to staff in bonuses – a period when total shareholder return was down 34 per cent and dividends to investors were only £2.7bn. Barclays had the highest leverage of any of the British banks at the time of the financial crisis, including RBS.

 

This was a high octane investment bank – run for the benefit of its top employees rather than shareholders or customers – with a retail bank tacked on.

Urging the bank to pay people fairly, set high standards and so on – which Barclays should be doing anyway – will achieve nothing.

Shareholders will continue to be bilked and the taxpayer will remain on the hook if disaster strikes.

Barclays has already shown its contempt for the Salz process by releasing details of Rich Ricci’s £17m jackpot under the cover of Budget day, a classic example of the too-clever-by-half attitude it is supposed to be leaving behind.

Nor does its decision to retain Agius – the former chairman who honourably resigned after presiding over the worst litany of disgrace in the bank’s entire history – on a £175,000 a year consultancy deal suggest a wholehearted break with the past.

The only way to protect taxpayers from the gutter morality of the casino bank is a full separation of High Street and investment banking.

The abuses of Welfare UK may be an outrage in urgent need of reform, but so is Bankfare Britain.

Patently challenged

The decision in the supreme court of India to refuse Swiss pharma giant Novartis a patent for a new version of its blood cancer drug Glivec is a significant one. It could set a precedent that will prevent other overseas companies obtaining patents on variants of existing drugs.

Patents are vital to the pharmaceutical industry; without them, fewer lifesaving treatments would be developed. In India, however, they are constantly under challenge from that country’s £17bn generic drugs industry.

Health activists argue that rich multinational drug firms profiteer at the expense of the poor, though Novartis, in fact, provided Glivec free of charge to the vast majority patients in India.

But the recent controversy over its plans to pay £50m to departing boss Daniel Vassella, which provoked a national revolt over boardroom excess in Switzerland, cannot have helped its courtroom case.

A stiff dose of pay restraint sounds like just what the doctor ordered.

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