Balch, from Leyland in Lancashire, was among four people who suffered serious leg injuries after two carriages on the Smiler rollercoaster ride collided at the Staffordshire theme park on Tuesday.
We had some brutal disagreements – about whether to make strikes in the essential services illegal (I thought not, and eventually won), and about whether to close down British Leyland (again, I thought no, and won).
They began their careers working in their father's textile and trading businesses in Mumbai and Tehran, Iran but soon branched out by buying truck maker, Ashok Leyland from British Leyland and Gulf Oil from Chevron in the 1980s, while establishing banks in Switzerland and India in the 1990s.
Vicky Balch, 19, from Leyland in Lancashire, has been named as the other of the four people seriously injured in Tuesday's accident.
The Hinduja brothers, who run everything from Ashok Leyland, a truckmaker in India, to a Swiss bank, are partly based in London.
On September 18th the coalition announced a new £600m bung to the better-off: free school lunches, currently means-tested, will be extended to children from affluent families too.Not Leyland, but still worryingThings have mercifully moved on from the 1970s, when explicit support for dying heavy industries with powerful unions cost Britain heavily.
The hall of infamy is filled with costly failures like Minitel (a dead-end French national communications network long since overtaken by the internet) and British Leyland (a nationalised car company).
Safety considerations will be taken care of by having chains of approved dealers who meet manufacturers' technical standards for repair and maintenance work.The final paradox concerns Britain's booming industry, now turning out 2m cars a year, back up to the output levels of the 1970s, before the unions started demolishing Rover's antecedent, British Leyland.
He had spent his professional life up to then with the old British Leyland (later known as Rover) and moved to British Aerospace when the government sold it the state-owned car company for £150m in 1988.
Mr Marchionne feels he is winning the argument with most workers but, he says, a group of leftists, amounting to around one-eighth of the workforce, is bent on disruption.Such bloody-mindedness is reminiscent of the death throes of British Leyland in the early 1980s.
If expansion keeps on at the lick of the past three years, within two years its output will be back to the record level of 1972, when British Leyland was the third-biggest car firm in the world and Dagenham and Luton were in full swing.
