Thursday 13 April 2023

The Brexit wrecking ball is still working

The Brexit wrecking ball continues its destructive path through British industry like a demented pinball, demolishing perfectly viable businesses in new and unpredicted ways. Brexit keeps surprising us on the downside and we're nowhere near done yet. The 14 employees of Cluny Lace in Ilkeston are the latest to feel its impact. They look like losing their jobs in the 200-year-old firm after HMRC decided the company must pay an 8% duty on its own production when it returns from a specialist dyer in France as part of the finishing process. The tax authorities are demanding the duty on all back-production since Brexit happened in 2021. Who knew?

The MD Charles Mason wrote a letter to the FT which was published on Tuesday (HERE no£).

It may be that some of the workers voted for Brexit. Ilkeston after all is in Erewash, Derbyshire where 61.2% wanted to leave the EU. If so, they may think the price they are now being asked to pay is a little more expensive than they were led to believe.

At least they will be able to comfort themselves that The Daily Mail and the other pro-Brexit press won’t be able to blame barmy EU bureaucrats. This is all our own doing, albeit courtesy of leaving the EU.

This cuts through for me because I’m from Nottingham originally. There’s a whole section of the city known as the Lace Market, where the industry was once centred although, by the end of the 19th century, it had spread to every part. If you're interested there's a video on YouTube HERE.

Note in the video the substantial and elaborate three and four-storey buildings all basically the same design as the Cluny factory in Ilkeston. They were constructed when Britain was exporting lace all over the world and shows what can be done when there is a strong flow of money coming into an area.

This is Cluny Lace in Belper Street, Ilkeston:

My own mother and plenty of her relatives and my ancestors worked in lace factories just like it. The industry gradually died and the Lace Market today is an avant-garde area full of old multi-storey factories now converted to surprisingly nice yuppie apartments. 

Cluny Lace is in Ilkeston, actually well to the west of Nottingham, and one of the last lace makers left struggling to survive. I’ll never forgive what those who supported Brexit have done to us.

It may be that Cluny Lace would have failed eventually. The accounts are abridged so you can't see the profit and loss but there was a transfer out of shareholder funds last year into the P&L account so I assume this means they made a loss. There is no doubt though that Brexit has delivered the final blow. I wonder if the employees will realise?

Greg Hands

If you are on Twitter you will have noticed the number of furious tweets being pumped out ahead of this May’s local elections by the chair of the Conservative Party Greg Hands. They come at you like a blizzard. This one is typical:

I feel sorry for him. My mind goes back to 2019 when in December we trudged the streets of Pudsey, Keighley and Wakefield knocking on doors in solid working-class areas trying to drum up support for Jeremy Corbyn.

You needed to be a bit delusional if, after a few hours, you thought Labour had a snowball’s chance in hell. Every third house, you got a mouthful about JC from lifelong supporters of the party. It was natural Labour territory but you knew they were going to lose.

I imagine Mr Hands is now getting a taste of that. The Tories know they're going to have a disastrous May and are pretty certain to go on to a truly historic defeat in the 2024 general election.

Polling

Omnisis published another poll yesterday with similar results as all the other recent ones but they focus even more specifically on Brexit and ask how people would vote in another referendum. There are some surprising results.

Asked:  If tomorrow there were another referendum on EU membership, how do you think you would vote? the result was 57% to 43% excluding don't knows. This is really good and shows how much the voters are turning against the whole idea.

But the odd thing is that Conservative voters are MORE LIKELY to vote to STAY OUT than they were in 2016. In the referendum, they opted to leave by 61% to 39% but now, after nearly seven years of chaos, they would vote 65% to 35% to stay out!

I assume this means others must have turned against it even more (I haven't gone through the numbers yet having only spotted them a few minutes ago) which indicates we are becoming increasingly divided. It shows perhaps how hard it is to admit you were wrong.
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