The hottest car I ever owned was a 1982 Volkswagen Scirocco GTI in metallic dark green. I once drove it overnight from London to Tuscany with a blind date who never spoke to me again, but that’s another story. My point is that VW built my generation’s chariots of fire and some of us feel more sadness than schadenfreude at what the Telegraph calls ‘the downfall of a German giant’, as the flagship of its nation’s industrial armada contends with multiple impacts of geopolitical and technological change. But I’d say the image of VW ‘speeding towards a precipice as the Chinese move in’ is more than a touch overhyped. It’s a narrative of our era that the West collectively must always challenge.
The VW synopsis is this: along with other German carmakers, the group has suffered a shrinkage of lucrative exports to China, while Chinese EV manufacturers have invaded Europe. Donald Trump’s tariffs have whacked US orders and (much less talked about) Putin’s war has wrecked sales to Russia. VW employs far too many workers – 650,000 at last count – in too many factories, while the loss of cheap Russian energy has spiked its operating costs.
Now there’s talk of halving the model range, cutting 100,000 jobs, closing plants (including the one at Osnabrück that made my Scirocco), possible spin-off of the group’s other marques which include Porsche, Lamborghini and Ducati as well as Audi, Seat and Skoda – and even a Chinese take-over of what’s left, as happened to Volvo of Sweden and MG in the UK.
Hard to argue with any of that as a scenario of doom, except to say that none of it is new or surprising. VW bosses, led by chief executive Oliver Blume, have long been wrangling with the company’s powerful but intransigent unions over the job cuts that inevitably follow from a shift to EVs. A rationalisation of the range likewise makes sense as it focuses on EV conversions of existing internal-combustion model platforms. And the first of those, the ID Polo, launched this month at a starting price below €25,000, has been acclaimed by the motoring media. The Chinese produce cheap EVs with smart batteries, but they’re rubbish to drive: the Germans still have a leading edge in engineering. My man in the motor trade – he indeed who sold me the Scirocco long ago – is so confident of revival that he’s upped his holding of VW’s shares, which have slumped by two-thirds in the past five years. And for confirmation, here’s the authentic petrolhead voice of Top Gear magazine: ‘[Volks-wagen’s] fightback has well and truly begun.’
Can’t be worse?
I first met John Healey, the new Chancellor, in 1992 when he was Labour’s candidate (and I was campaigning for the incumbent) in the then rock-solid Conservative constituency of Ryedale in North Yorkshire. We all found Healey decent, serious and a gracious loser in a seat he was never going to win, though I recall one Tory toff harrumphing that as an old boy of St Peter’s, the public school in York, he also counted as a class traitor. That apart, subsequent encounters confirmed the decency – and his seriousness was underlined by the fact that he sent himself on a year’s course at the Royal College of Defence Studies in preparation for the frontbench brief that became his forte.
Nothing in Healey’s prior career, in charities and at the TUC, suggests a natural grasp of how private-sector investment and entrepreneurship drive tax-revenue growth and make state spending viable, including bigger defence budgets, while excessive welfare costs wreck every other plan. But I suspect he’s serious enough to grasp that in short order. The optimist’s mantra for this week has to be: ‘Can’t be worse than the last lot.’
The new Business Secretary, by contrast, actually is the last lot. Jonathan Rey-nolds held that job for the first 14 months of the Starmer administration and promised to ‘supercharge the economy with pro-business decisions’ but did nothing of the kind. Can he be worse second time round? He certainly set himself a very low bar.
Brassed off again
‘Nobody knows anything,’ said the screenwriter William Goldman. ‘Nobody – not now, not ever – knows the least goddamn thing about what is or isn’t going to work at the box office.’ How right he was, given that the release of Christopher Nolan’s film of The Odyssey attracted as much attention as the World Cup finals. More significantly, five years after the pandemic, who would have thought box offices would be enjoying a mini-boom while the online streaming services we thought had killed cinema are scrabbling for new subscribers?
US cinema sales are close to 2019 levels. Tim Richards, boss of Vue International which operates 225 multiscreen sites in the UK and Europe, told the Financial Times that this summer could be ‘the biggest on record’. The Everyman chain, with 49 upmarket UK venues, enjoyed a 23 per cent increase in admissions in the first five months of 2026. Statistics are more mixed at Odeon and Cineworld, and all depend on top-sellers such as The Devil Wears Prada 2 as well as The Odyssey. But the trend suggests the public has revalued the sociable cinema experience as it has tired of the lonesome home screen and its hidden price stings. Netflix, whose shares have almost halved in the past year, is diversifying from on-demand streaming to live events and sports. Anything worth watching on Amazon Prime seems to demand an additional subscription. Apple TV is a rip-off for those who bought it solely to watch Slow Horses.
The next risk, we’re told, is that the takeover of Warner Bros by Paramount Skydance (which beat Netflix in the bidding) will lead to a reduction in studio output of the ultraviolent epics that tend to put bums on cinema seats everywhere. But here in Burnham’s backward-looking Britain, what could be more attuned to the zeitgeist than an evening of mordant anti-Thatcherite northern humour at what we all used to call the pictures: yes, it’s time for a blockbuster revival tour of Brassed Off.
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