De La Rue, the British passport supplier who lost the contract for the new blue passport, has decided not to appeal (HERE). After going public about losing the £490 million order, claiming they were being undercut on price and implying their Franco-Dutch rival were proposing sub standard passports, they seem to have been convinced there is no difference or at the very least, Gemalto's passports are of perfectly acceptable quality.
I think anyone who has any dealings whatsoever with virtually any European company of any size will find serious people, full of innovative ideas to cut costs but still provide high quality goods and services.
At one time in the 1990s I worked for a French manufacturer of palletisers, automatic machines for stacking goods onto wooden pallets at a £100k a pop, where a senior technical manager was charged with reducing the cost of manufacturing by 2% every year! This was in addition to his normal work as well. I never met anyone or worked for any UK company with the same ethos. Cost increases were routinely and unchallengingly accepted. In fact we thought it was perfectly normal.
If we are to become global Britain we need to adopt this kind of attitude - but we could have done it anyway, Brexit is completely irrelevant.
