After recent successes PM must hammer home the point that post-Brexit Britain is open for business
THERESA May’s bruising week could have ended in disaster yesterday.
Imagine if — after Sunderland voted so overwhelmingly for Brexit — Nissan’s boss had emerged grim-faced from Downing Street doubting the future of the city’s giant car plant.
Instead he said the PM had filled him with confidence about Britain’s future as “a place to do business”. Which sounds like great news for Sunderland and the new Qashqai contract.
Honda in Swindon is similarly upbeat — and so are we. But it would be good if Mrs May could inspire every firm in Britain . . . small, medium and large.
Some, already nervous about Brexit, were spooked by the anti-business tone of the Tory Conference.
Indeed we share their dislike of staff reps being imposed on company boards. And the apparent idea to target their migrant workers.
Mrs May must strike a new balance between preventing businesses ripping off consumers and chucking a spanner in the engine of the economy.
She must keep hammering home to them all that Britain “will be more open after Brexit, not less”.
Our ability to trade directly with the wide world outside Europe is crucial to our prosperity. And we can certainly do so more easily and rapidly than the EU.
After seven years of talks, its monster deal with Canada is being held to ransom by a single people, the Belgian Walloons.
War has a flaw
PUNISHING Britain for leaving the EU will hurt our economy and theirs.
In the short-term, jobs could go here. But as we forge ahead in the world, we will create more. It’s hard to see the crumbling EU doing the same.
So if the aim, championed by EU Council chief Donald Tusk, is to play hardball to deter other increasingly eurosceptic nations from leaving, it’s flawed.
Continental workers won’t like their jobs being sacrificed to make a political point. Nor by their countries being kept shackled to the EU through fear.
Brussels would be better off negotiating with Britain for our mutual benefit.
And if one day another nation is tempted to go, make a better case for them staying than was ever put to the voters of Britain.
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Get building
THE country is in dire need of new homes. So Chancellor Philip Hammond’s building blitz cannot come soon enough.
The middle-classes in the Home Counties know this to be true.
But they’ll scream blue murder if new developments go up on Green Belt land in their villages and towns. Yet it’s London and the South-East with the greatest shortage and too little viable land.
Some of that Green Belt will have to be freed up — and the “not-in-my-backyard” protests faced down.