Yes.

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Paul "Every county of England, every country of Europe and every (part of every inhabited) continent of the Earth" 94% done! What's left? Central America, East, Central and West Africa, Australia & New Zealand

The British car industry is alive and well. The fact a Nissan is made in Sunderland makes it no less British that a Cortina made in Dagenham. No one will upset this massive organisation of trained, efficient workers. If they could pick it up and move it without trouble it would be in China now. We won't stop buying their BMW's so they'll have to keep buying our Nissans. The components are Chinese anyway, so only the point of entry into the EU changes.

BMW are vocal about brexit because in the UK their brand commands a premium where as in others it drops down amongst the high-average ones. They correctly anticipate any spat will effect both BMW and Mini, but this is one German company trying to avoid a bit extra work not the whole economy.

Andy

The logic of moving to a non-EU country like Switzerland in fear of the UK also becoming a non-EU country defeats me.


My industry is the heavily regulated and protectionist airline industry. It wound me up no end to watch Paul Kahn, the president of Airbus Group UK who said Airbus would not end its activities in the UK in the event of a vote to leave the EU but warned that future investments depended “very much on the economic environment in which the company operates”. This is the same company who a week earlier rolled off its first A321 at their new US Alabama plant and the same company who offered to transfer wing production from Broughton in Wales to China in exchange for a large order. So no change there, why did they make the intervention? What they don't want is the UK or Welsh government having the ability in an independent BREXITED UK to interfere should they wish to to move production out of the UK. This is how they want it, the EU to be supreme, an EU they can and do manipulate and the Welsh or UK government having little influence. As with steel so with aerospace.


Paul Kahn failed to mention (and was failed to be challenged on) if he would also decline the billions of taxpayers money used to build up Airbus – about €5 billion per project and if we left the EU would his outfit not ask the UK taxpayer for future subsidies, subsidies on which Airbus is 100% dependent. Draw your own conclusions...


As per my recent post about Triumph already anticipating the EU legislation, on hold until after the referendum, have made up their mind about whether to be in the EU or not and voted with their feet; they have built their four new factories in Thailand and Brazil


The other day I watched Ford's European chief Jim Farley state his company's position as Britain is better off remaining. The autocutie “interviewing” him failed to challenge the man on the fact that Ford, who continue to make many components in the UK closed down the factory that made that icon of the “British one man band” the Transit Van, the last Ford vehicle factory in the UK and moved it outside the EU to Turkey. Months before the closure they took £10m off the British tax payer to bolster the Southampton plant that made it. Jim Farley (and said “reporter”) neglected to mention the fact the Ford, the wealthiest and most profitable of the US car makers also got an £80m cheap loan from guess who? Yes the EU - to build up their Turkish plant. UK taxpayers subsidised Ford to move their plant outside the EU with the help of the EU.




As Cochise would say “white man talk with forked tongue”. Take away message is, there is no econonmic downside, only upside to leaving.



In any case, this referendum will be won on immigration and a strong stomach is needed for that distasteful fight.

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There is no need for a strong stomach for the immigration issue....its quite easy...put a stop to it so we as 'The British' stop getting fleeced by foreigners taking the p!33 out of our welfare and health systems.
I am a foreigner in the country I am living in, I don't ask for nowt and I definitely won't get nowt, as hard as it is, Thailand has it right in that respect

Wayne

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The Balkans
https://new.horizonsunlimited.com/poi_entity/8417

Which one? Morgan or McLaren?

The British car industry is now owned by foreign companies or, as you pointed out, a foreign car maker with a plant over here to get round import duty and costs.

It really grates when you see smiling politicians happy that Jonny foreigner is building there cars over here and creating so many new jobs. They fail to add where the company profits are heading - out of the UK. Add in the loss of import duty that would be payable.

Jobs that would have been in the UK anyway if they hadn't meddled with our industries in that first place with forced mergers and selling off for a pittance.
Then when they sold them to their chums for next to bugger all, who then thoroughly screwed the companies, workforce and even dipped into pension schemes to fund their lifestyles, allow them to get off scot free.

This whole EU debate is really a question of who is going to screw us over the least. To be honest, I'm not sure.

Yes the EU has developed into a monster that is getting pretty much out of control, that is now making pretty bad decisions to try to hold it together.
On the other you have our own political parties that look no further into our countries future than the next general election, will sell us all down the river to get one over their opposition and above all are all in it to line their own pockets and further their own careers.

Welcome to the reality of capitalism. You can have your freedoms if you can afford it.

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Fastship - Airbus is another shining example of how we continually get sold out.
I would hate to see how much money the British government sank into joint projects, like Concorde for example, for a foreign company to walk away with all the manufacturing rights.

I'm afraid it started long before that though. Duncan Sandy's white paper did more damage to the British aircraft industries than the Luftwaffe. The only aircraft to survive his cuts was the English Electric Lightning, which was almost at production stage, everything else was cancelled.

Most controversially was TSR2, which was well into development and was under going air trails. Costs were well over budget, however initial signs were this was a world beating aircraft.
Unfortunately, the US also had an aircraft in the same category that they wanted to sell, so we scrapped ours - literally - and paid out millions for theirs that didn't turn up for years. (F-111).
So badly was it delayed, that the Buccaneer was developed and put into production as a stop gap.
If
Another fantastic decision by our elected leaders. I wonder how much was made by who on these matters, or am I just being too cynical?

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Nope, not you who's cynical. TSR2 was an American, criminal intervention (remember them, our “friends” as Obama likes to state) in our industry and led to a massive brain drain, mostly to the US and Canada. In Canada it happened again with the AVRO Arrow. Again that advanced project was abrublty cancelled for no good reason and led to the collapse of AVRO there and virtually destroyed their advanced aerospace industry. Much of the US civil aviation industry was populated with Brits after that, even now although the B737, a fifty year old design now was largely developed into a viable aircraft by the Germans at Lufty.


The Phantom F4 was another example of this. I read the late, great Eric Brown's biography recently. Probably the greatest ever test pilot Captain Brown was instrumental in the testing and selection of the F4 for the navy and pronounced it a great aircraft, an almost unique view even in America!

The long term upshot of all this can be seen in the JSF F35 for the two new carriers; Lockheed's programme is $200 billion over budget and it's still not performing to specs but the US has a monopoly now so what can we do? Just to reiterate, that's $200,000,000,000 over budget...and no aircraft are now made in the UK. None.


I can see parallels in the commercial world with Russia's excellent, new MS-21 and China's A-320 knock-off the C-919. Both will struggle to sell globally but not because of any technical deficiencies. It's all politics.


Getting back to the issue at hand, in a free trading nation such issues may not arise, we could import from whomever, tariff free and to whomever on whatever terms they wish to damage themselves upon.


You can only fight one battle at a time. Vote Leave.

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I see that another Brexit argument cannot be reconciled with the facts;

Brexit argues that the EU will push the TTIP and that's been one of their main arguments for leaving, but today we learn that:-

http://www.theguardian.com/business/...ock-eu-us-deal

More interestingly that;

All 28 EU member states and the European parliament will have to ratify TTIP before it comes into force.

Which isn't looking likely as the more left-leaning states will no doubt be scrutinizing the TTIP...

But here's the interesting part - Brexit portray this as some sort of amazing Braveheart-esq struggle for 'freedom', but in reality without Europe, the Tories would sell us down the river in a heartbeat;

Just thought that's an interesting example of how the EU protects British citizens from their wretched elitist government. Brexit just looks worse and worse.

Regarding the previous post, a couple of facts are missing:-

1. France has elections next year and Hollande has the worst polls of any sittting French president since year dot; something of the order of 25% popularity, and sinking.
Therefore, he will say whatever it takes to his target audience (small French farmers in this case) to win in 2017.

2. British national governments are re-elected every 5 years (although you wouldn't think that from the tone of the posting); the European Commission is "for ever" and completely unelected.
- We even have elections on Thursday this week.

Take your pick of these articles:-
EU Archives - TruePublica

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Dave

But western, and westernised, nations are no longer engaged in capitalism, and therein lies the heart of the problem.

In short, real economies for real people in the real world have been abandoned by the financial engineering plutocrats (and how I do hate the latter expression and the associated bastardisation of the word "engineering").

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Dave

Yep.

The US congress would also have to ratify any such deal; some say that is unlikely given current events in the USA.
(Pres elect Trump).
Just Say No to Corporate Rule

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Dave

Well we agree on that my friend, but seems to me a collective voice in the form of the EU is better to oppose the TTIP than a disorganized one. Germany and France are already turning against it. Over 3,000,000 signatories against it and a 150,000 written complaints to the EU commission from EU citizens. Together we stand, divided we fall etc.

And there we differ: you have an amazing level of faith in the European Commission, flying in the face of all available evidence concerning how they operate.
It's called "Real Politics".
Just today, the EC has announced that Turkey will get it's visa free access to Europe irrespective of how Turkey has not done what they committed to under an earlier "agreement" that was brokered by just one nation, Germany.
Just watch the nations succomb to "he who pays the piper calls the tune".

For further reading, this is from yesterday, posted elsewhere and purloined by me for the sake of this discourse:-
"Thank you for your Blog. I did a similar thing and you can find my essays at http://www.partismfoundation.org/wp-...16-24-4-16.pdf
Whilst the Treasury’s EU Impact Analysis Report is nothing like as bad as Dave’s Dodgy Dossier which has come through everyone front door, it hasvery clearly been written to an agenda, as you say mixing apples and pears to make the points the Government wants to make. Thankfully the various Fact Checker websites (BBC, Channel 4, Telegraph etc.) appear to have done a reasonable job in pointing out the immediate errors and flaws. However, there is one major problem with the Treasury document which appears to have been missed by most commentators.
It is perfectly fair to say that, on average and when taken as a whole, immigrants contribute in taxes as much as they enjoy in public services. In fact, some calculations show that they contribute slightly more. But all these figures are based upon current account.
The argument that immigrants are social security scroungers is not only untrue but repugnant. There is the whole debate about immigrant remittances to their families overseas and the effect this has on the UK economy but that is another debate completely.
What is missing from the Treasury’s calculations and assessment is the capital cost of dealing with immigration. This is the cost of providing housing, schools, hospitals, water, sewage treatment, roads, and transport to name but a few. Each year the UK has to build public infrastructure equivalent to the size of the city of Leicester to cater for inward immigration.
If you assume the capital cost at £75,000 per person (£300,000 for a family of four), then the state has to borrow £22.5 billion to provide infrastructure for 300,000 new people arriving in the UK, and will have to do this each and every year that we are a member of the EU and have to abide by the principle of free movement of labour.
The interest on this £22.5bn is £562.5 million per year (assuming an interest rate of 2.5% – which is the long term average of UK interest rates). Using the same 26.7 million households as the Treasury, then this means that the interest cost is just a mere £21.00 per household per year. But this has to be paid every year. If you gross up these £21 per household per year for the same15 years as the Treasury has done, then the total interest cost per household is £2,840 which is about just under 70% of the £4,200 cost the Treasury estimates we are all going to be poorer in 15 years’ time if we Brexit. However, our National Debt will be £337.5bn higher, an increase of 21.6% above £1.56 trillion the UK is borrowing today.
If the EU had supported its free movement of labour policy with a fund which allowed for money to follow people, so as to pay for the infrastructure, as so many people have argued, then I for one would find it much harder to argue to leave the EU, for the only issue then outstanding would be the democratic deficit. But, there would be no democratic deficit if the EU listened and acted with appropriate policies on the genuine concerns of the peoples of this Island. Instead, continuously over the last 10 years the EU commission has refused to entertain such an idea.
It is worth comparing this idea of a Free Movement of Labour Structure Fund to the Common Agricultural Policy which takes 39% of its budget yet this sector accounts for only 1.5% of the EU’s GDP, and it only employs 5.4% of the total population; or to the Common Fisheries Policy which has killed off the UK fishing fleet whilst its CFP Fund goes to subsidising the fishing fleets of Spain etc.
The repugnant and illegal deal brokered by Angela Merkel, Jean-Claude Jancker, President of the EU Commission and Turkish President Erdogan for the repatriation of refugees from the EU back to Turkey highlights the democratic deficit. There is logic to Jancker and Erdogan being in the negotiations but why is Merkel representing the whole of the EU? Where is her democratic authority to represent 504 million people? She had none, but these people have just spent €6 billion of your and my money and struck a fundamentally illegal deal.
As I say in my essay on ‘The European Union, the refugee crises and Turkey’, this deal reminded me of the dreadful trade of human cargo of Nazi Germany and the railway sidings of Birkenau death camp.
At the end of the Second World War, the UK repatriated thousands of Poles back to Poland, at the insistence of Stalin, for them to meet dreadful deaths in his Gulag’s. It appears that those who lead the EU have learned nothing from our very recent history. Who is making sure that the EU is not repatriating any Iraqi Kurds because their chances in Erdogan’s Turkey are pretty damn slim? It makes me so damn angry.
This year the UK is going to be fined by the EU Commission €400m for breaching air quality laws. Laws which the UK can’t possible meet because we are such a densely populated country with a high proportion of diesel engine cars. These have a much higher poisonous nitrous-oxide and particulate output than a petrol car. It is estimated that around 40,000 people die each year in this country from bad air quality. We have to remember is the was the EU’s obsession for lower CO² output which caused them to promote diesel engines above petrol. What we know also know is that it the EU Comitology committee (See democratic deficit video at https://youtu.be/wPP1k8mNSYs), which is responsible for setting car standards, came under intense lobbying pressure from the car industry to set emission testing standards which were nothing like what happens when a car is driven. The discovery of VW’s emission testing defeat devise is only a small part of a scandal which goes to the heart of the EU.
One of the most frightening aspect of the EU is its determination to have its own military. How can this be a good idea, especially when it will be reporting to a bunch of unelected oligarchs? Do we really want to put our children and grandchildren at risk of being called up to fight in such an army? It is one throw from the EU becoming a military dictatorship like Egypt, Greece, Burma (now called Myanmar). Welcome back Napoleon!
Since time immemorial, people have been prepared to sacrifice democracy for economic gain. It is what brought Stalin to power in Russia and Hitler to power in Germany. It was what allowed Putin to remain in power in Russia whilst he seized back dictatorial type powers and took control of its media. It is why the UK was prepared to cede sovereignty to the EU in 1972. This is all well and good until things go wrong, as they did with Hitler, Stalin, Putin and now in the EU, when the peoples find out that they cannot remove from power those that are doing them harm.
Except now in the UK when we have once in a life time opportunity.
I hope our country is wise enough not to take the 30 pieces of silver offer by our High Priests"

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Dave

I was veering on the out campaign because of the mess of the EU and I think the UK would relish the challenges without it.

Then I saw the government for what it was and realised that I don't trust a single one of them to look after what us important to me. Mainly human rights and environmental concerns.

I just don't trust our government to operate without the policing of the EU.

So I'll probably vote in.


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