UK: So is this really the great new idea – saving the gas-guzzler?

A public bail-out of Jaguar Land Rover would have nothing to do with rationality, fairness or morality

…So, when assessing the plight of Jaguar Land Rover we should ask ourselves – once we’ve thought about all the poor workers – whether we want to live in a world without the 4.2 litre V8 petrol supercharged Jaguar which emits 299g of CO2 per kilometre: “True to our heritage,” say the makers, “we’ve used the most luxurious materials and insisted on exquisite attention to every detail.” To say nothing of a world without the Land Rover Defender SVX (291g/km) which went into production earlier this year with a breathtaking indifference towards cultural, as well as climate change, long after such vehicles had been nicknamed Chelsea tractors, and their urban use by anyone who could afford to do otherwise widely agreed to be an a unerring marker of the driver’s selfishness and vacuity.


Recently, in fact, it has been hard to conceive of the city dweller, beyond the target readership of How to Spend It, the flashier kind of drug dealer, and noted SUV fans Jon Gaunt and Zara Phillips, who would regard ownership of so ostentatiously inconsiderate a vehicle as anything other than an embarrassment.

All of which, if we were not now accustomed to the counterintuitive nature of public bail-outs, would make the prospect of state intervention to save Jaguar Land Rover look very capricious indeed. Why should public money be used to protect an incipiently archaic business which, iconic or not, is run by India’s Mr Tata? Who, though he may be concerned about manufacturing jobs in the Midlands, has just agreed to slosh some of his corporation’s vast profits in the direction of Ferrari’s Formula One team? Which, with our date with peak oil now fixed for 2020, would appear to be almost as unedifying a use of cash as would be our own, to guarantee the continued production of Land Rovers and Jaguars. We know better, after the rescue of our still unreformed banks, than to expect the government to demand improved standards of competence and responsibility in exchange for civic support.

Guardian