The imminent break-up of Rover hit Birmingham like a bombshell last week. There is a lot of anger. At Saturday’s Birmingham City match with Barnsley, the crowd roared its approval when a solidarity message was read out over the PA.

Tony Blair was quick to explode at BMW management for concealing their sell-off plans from the UK Government, and Trade and Industry Stephen Byers in particular.

The German company hit back, blaming the strength of sterling and Britain’s refusal to adopt the ’euro’ for its ongoing losses. Some commentators blamed the EU for supposedly delaying a loan which might have staved off the crisis. Others pointed out that Rover had a marketing problem, not caused by BMW. For a change, no-one blamed the workers.

But behind this public invective, there is another question affecting all trade unionists in Rover. The company, the Government, and the media have been out in front for a week. It will be Tuesday before the stewards from all Rover plants - Longbridge, Solihull, Cowley, and Swindon - meet to discuss their next move, with an emergency Joint National Negotiating Committee convened today.

“Why were we kept in the dark?,” they are likely to ask. The obvious answer is that the T&GWU did not know what was going on either. And that may well be true.

But LabourNet understands that when T&G national negotiator Tony Woodley travelled to Germany last week to meet the company, he also met the German unions. IG Metall, the powerful engineering union, has members on the BMW Supervisory Board. Chairman of the Central Works Council Manfred Schoch would normally thereby be privy to all decisions and was in fact helpful to the T&G when BMW bought the company.

There would seem to be a limited number of possibilities.

Either Schoch knew what was about to happen but didn’t tell the T&G even though as a trade unionist, it should have been obvious that he must do so.

Or, Schoch did tell the T&G who for some reason never passed the information on.

Or, Schoch didn’t know either in which case IG Metall should be up in arms. No sign of that though.

In any case, there is no chance that the rank and file membership of IG Metall knew what was going on in the BMW board. The story would certainly have crossed the Channel.

These questions are central, because any decision by the Rover workforce to oppose the sell-off or the redundancy terms will require a fighting unity not only between all plants in Britain, but also with their colleagues in Germany.

This is not about England vs Germany. It is about workers vs management. But we need to know who is playing on which team.