BREXIT

[VNA]

More on Honda;

It will be in similar lodges around Tokyo that Brexit’s impact on Japan’s UK investments will now be discussed. In the 1980s this is where consensus was reached that Margaret Thatcher’s commitment to the European single market and customs union, along with her labour market reforms, offered a major opportunity for Japanese business. It would allow Britain to be the place where Japan could develop its famed “just-in-time” delivery system by sourcing production across Europe, without tariffs, regulatory and customs checks, and foster the recruitment and management of talent Europe-wide. They took her at her word, and the investment boom that has transformed the British car industry was born.

Today, a new Japanese consensus has formed. The Conservative party and its leaders cannot be trusted. They ignore warnings, break their word and do not understand business – personified by Old Etonians Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg. Brexit is a first-order disaster, striking at the heart of how Japanese companies organise themselves as “lean manufacturers”. As Honda’s Patrick Keating, its European government affairs manager, briefed a meeting in Swindon in September, Brexit is likely to interrupt the just-in-time delivery of 2 million parts a day – a fifth of which come from EU suppliers. Those suppliers would have to fill out 60,000 customs declaration forms a year, he warned. One in five of its UK workforce are EU nationals. The world of tariff-free barriers – access to the EU’s free-trade agreements with other countries, and ability to move staff between countries promised by Thatcher – has evaporated in front of Honda’s eyes. Yes, it was operating below capacity, but within the EU Honda could have taken a long-term view and braved the downturn. Brexit forced the plant’s closure and the decision to produce in Japan.

  Will Hutton (political economist, academic administrator, and journalist)
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...n-liam-fox