---

MG Rover

I, too, congratulate the hon. Member for Birmingham, Northfield (Richard Burden) on securing this debate. We share the Rover car plant between our two constituencies. The past few months have been gruesome in my constituency and elsewhere in the west midlands, although really it is the past few years that have been gruesome, as we have watched the slow death of MG Rover since BMW pulled out in 2000. It is worth going back over the history, because, as the hon. Gentleman will not be surprised to learn, I rather dispute his view of how we got to where we are now, and of the decisions that the Government took. In 2000, when BMW announced that it was going to sell the car plant if it could, the then Secretary of State said that he had no idea that the Rover car company was in such great trouble. It beggars belief that anyone could be Secretary of State for Trade and Industry and not be aware of the difficulties of Britain's only domestic car maker. Nevertheless, that is what the right hon. Member for North Tyneside (Mr. Byers) said at the time. There is no question but that the Government, in a flat panic to try to put a sticking plaster over the difficulties that had been created by that announcement, ordered BMW to sell the car plant to Towers and the Phoenix consortium. When the hon. Member for Birmingham, Northfield says that there was no deal on the table to be done by Alchemy and Jon Moulton, because he pulled out before that period at the end of April—