ABSTRACT
In 1988, shortly after taking up a position in Oxford, I became involved in a research project concerning the fate of the Rover car plant in that city. Oxford, particularly for outsiders, is usually imagined as a city of dreaming spires and university grandeur, but as late as 1973 the car plant at Cowley in East Oxford employed some 27,000 workers, compared to fewer than 3,000 in the employ of the university. The insertion of the Morris Motors car plant into the mediaeval social fabric of the city early in the century had had enormous effects upon the political and economic life of the place, paralleling almost exactly the three-stage path to socialist consciousness set out in The Communist ~anifesto. Workers had steadily been massed tog~ther over the years in and around the car plant and its ancillary installations; they had become conscious of their own interests and built institutions (primarily the unions) to defend and promote those interests. During the 1930s and again in the 1960s and early 1970s, the car plant was the focus of some of the most virulent class struggles over the future of industrial relations in Britain. The workers' movement simultaneously created a powerful political instrument in the form of a local Labour Party that ultimately assumed continuous control of the local council after 1980. But by 1988 rationalizations and cutbacks had reduced the workforce to around 10,000, and by 1993 it was down to less than 5,000 (as opposed to the 7,000 or so then in the employ of the university). The threat of total closure of the car plant was never far away.
