The disposal of Cadbury is some kind of a marker. It was still a successful company and could have continued independently with no problem. It had a proud history which doesn’t need to be repeated here, but it also had a price. And that price was agreed by its board of directors who gained prodigiously from the sale. Cadbury’s loss of autonomy is surely the precursor of many cost reducing decisions taken at its new American headquarters without regard to the old Cadbury stakeholders, notably including its employees. Doubtless, in the end, Cadbury’s Bournville heritage will be preserved merely as yet another industrial museum, the dead remains of the once thriving industrial community. Such relics are strewn across the British landscape, commemorating our once pioneering roles in wool, cotton and silk textiles, machine tools, iron and steel, cycles, motor cycles, motor cars, trucks and buses, china and pottery and hundreds of other sectors where Britain was successful and achieved a strong position but then sold it off for the financial gain of the few and the bitter disadvantage of the many.

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