JAMES DYSON

James Dyson was on Radio 4 yesterday  morning suggesting we will have to leave the EU without any trade deal and export under WTO terms, saying this is OK and it won't affect his company because they already pay WTO tariffs. This is because his manufacturing takes place in Malaysia. It is a great example of a successful "British" company adding to our trade "deficit" rather than helping to produce a surplus. One might say he has so much faith in Britain that he has moved his manufacturing operation out of it!

RED TAPE

From 2011 to 2014 the government ran the red tape challenge (HERE) to try to find and mitigate the worst of the petty red tape regulations that were supposed to be "strangling" business and which had "spiralled out of control" according to the government website. However if you click on the Red Tape Challenge link on the government website you learn the whole thing was archived on 22nd May 2015 (HERE).

THE UK MOTORCYCLE INDUSTRY - A lesson from the past

Some time ago I came across a report about the British motorcycle industry (HERE) from 1975 which I think has some lessons for us today. Until the 1960s we had what we thought was a thriving industry with dozens of manufacturers all producing bikes for the UK market and for export all over the world. But this all came to an abrupt end when Honda began making bikes after the war. Single handedly, Honda destroyed an entire British industry leaving just a couple of niche manufacturers.

BEFORE THE EU

I am old enough (unfortunately) to remember what life was like before the EU. I worked for an American owned company from 1969-1992 with a large manufacturing operation in the UK. We exported and had a French sales office and small operations in South Africa and Australia. In 1973 we acquired a large German company producing similar machines, but often rather better than ours. At its height in 1990 or so, the company employed about 5-600 people in Europe.