Is there any hope left for Rover?

BBC NEWS | Have Your Say | Is there any hope left for Rover? – what’s wrong with this picture:

The collapse of Rover can also be attributed to Joe Public. Instead of blaming politicians and management, if you had been bothered about maintaining British manufacturing you would have all bought British, instead of buying cheaper foreign imports!
DW, Chicago USA (UK Expat)

Answers on a postcard please, send directly to the MINISTRY OF EX-PAT HYPOCRISY. Also:

I don’t see the directors of MG Rover rushing to put up their own money to save the business, so why should the government bale them out? I suspect that the directors will come out of this far richer than when they started.
Mark J, Stafford, UK

Uh, they put up £45,000,000. Are you living under a rock or something? Keep the fuck up.

This is perhaps more to the point:

As a truck driver, I waited 2 hours to get unloaded at Longbridge. Nobody wanted to know. They wonder why they’re losing their jobs!
Adrian Brackley, Cheshire

Part of the reason why Rover is such a dog is because it’s never really recovered from being crippled by the unions and their selfish, shortsighted jobsworth members in the 1970s and 1980s. The workers were perfectly willing to screw over Rover at the drop of a hat whenever it suited them. Well I’m sorry, but what goes around comes around. I’m sure Longbridge will be turned into a nice callcentre where you can all be retrained into doing something you’ll absolutely hate.

Don’t get me wrong, I regret the demise of Rover, I really do, but I feel sorry for the company rather than its workforce. I’m not saying they deserve to lose their jobs, but I am saying that they did nothing to help avoid this inevitable situation over the past 30 years.

Rover simply cannot continue to make shit old cars that nobody wants. It’s all very well to lay the blame for underinvestment in research and development and BMW’s door, but they cannot be held entirely responsible. After all, for a long time most of Rover’s output was based on Hondas, since Honda own (or at least, did own) 20% of Rover. Why is it that the same blame isn’t at least in part sent their way?

At the end of the day, Rover is a private company, in business, whether it’s got heritage or not. Would the government be bailing my company out if it was about to go under? I don’t think so. I’m sorry, but it’s a dog eat dog world in business, and if you make shit products that nobody wants then you can’t expect your meal tickets to continue to arrive ad infinitum. Let’s see your fucking unions argue with that.