On the bank holiday weekend, when prime minister Theresa May watched the cricket at Lords, the stevedores of Southampton loaded a Swedish ship with the cars and machines that Britain builds for export.
The 67,378-ton vehicles carrier Undine slipped into the Solent on the Saturday night to load for Halifax, Nova Scotia.
That’s Canada, where Theresa May’s international trade minister Liam Fox claimed in July he had opened ‘very fruitful’ post-Brexit trade talks, promptly denied by Canada’s trade minister Chrystia Freeland.
Undine was also loaded for the USA, where Dr Fox told an audience in Chicago:
A vote to leave the EU and a change in government means we now have a golden opportunity to make Britain a truly global trading nation.
We have nothing to fear from forging our own free-trade environment and breaking out on our own.
We have a low tax economy with some of the lowest business taxes in Europe and have one of the least regulated economies.
Back in London he told the Daily Telegraph:
I do not believe there is room for membership of the single market, if it entails free movement of people. We do not need to be part of the single market to sell into the single market; countries like the US do perfectly well in that position.
So what did the United Kingdom export aboard Undine last bank holiday weekend, to pay our way in the world and defray the May 2016 £9.9 billion trade deficit in goods?
The dockers at Southampton turned in at 08:00 on the Sunday to start driving hundreds of BMW Minis, Jaguars, Land Rovers and Range Rovers into the vast car carrier from Gothenburg.
The BMW Minis were built by a German company that now employs 5,500 British workers in a £100 million “Plant Oxford” at Cowley, supplied with engines from Hams Hall in Birmingham and steel pressings from Swindon.
The Land Rovers, the Range Rovers and the Jaguars, were built for an Indian company that employs 28,000 British workers.
JLR cars arrived in Southampton on 600-metre long freight trains hauled from Merseyside and Castle Bromwich by Canadian-built locomotives, owned and operated by DB Cargo UK, a subsidiary of the state-owned German railways.
Rolls Royces and Bentleys, built in Britain by subsidiaries of BMW and Volkswagen arrived from Chichester and Crewe.
Millions of components, sourced from all 28 EU member states, reach British assembly lines free of tariffs and customs supervision in the ‘just-in-time’ system, based on the Single European Act that was signed in 1987 by Margaret Thatcher.
The diesel engines in the Minis were built from components manufactured by Groupe PSA at Douvrin, an old coal mining town in Northern France.
The four-cylinder 2.0-litre diesel engines in the Jaguar XEs came from a £500 million JLR engine plant at Coven, Wolverhampton, opened by the Queen in 2015 at the invitation of the JLR chief executive Ralf Dieter Speth, a Bavarian with a doctorate in engineering from Warwick Business School.
Three out of every four of the Nissans, Hondas and Toyotas assembled in Britain are exported.
Undine, already loaded with EU exports from Bremerhaven, Gothenburg and Zeebrugge, topped off her transatlantic cargo with JCB diggers from Derbyshire and one enormous crated precision grinding machine, built for the 200 year old French engineering firm of Fives at their 200 year old Landis works in Cross Hills, Keighley, Yorkshire, for their newly-purchased machine tool builders Fives Cincinnati.
There is nothing necessarily neo-liberal about globalisation. It’s been rolling since the dark ages and in a Westminster debate on Tuesday no-one dared offer any technical suggestions about how the European Single Market could ever be unravelled with profit.
Chancellor Philip Hammond admitted in July:
If a future treaty between the U.K. and the EU-27 is deemed to be a mixed competence, it will have to be ratified by 27 national parliaments. I think I am right in saying the shortest time in which that has been done in any EU treaty is just under four years, and that is after taking into account the time it has taken to negotiate,
The Daily Mail reported on Monday that Hammond is now ‘accused of muscling in on Brexit negotiations to benefit finance and car industry’.
Dr Fox was in India on bank holiday Monday as Undine headed westwards at 17 knots, bound for Halifax, New York, Charleston SC and Brunswick GA.
Business Standard reported Dr Fox’s lack of success in New Delhi early on August 30:
Liam Fox, the UK’s Secretary of State for International Trade has held meetings with the Union Finance Minister Shri Arun Jaitley in New Delhi during a three day visit to India
Shri Jaitley however told Dr Fox that any new Free Trade Agreement with UK would depend on terms and conditions of the UK’s withdrawal from the EU.
Undine was making 16.1 knots 500 miles off the coast of Nova Scotia when Theresa May took her place on the second row of the world leaders assembled for the official photograph at the Hangzhou G20 summit meeting.
The Japanese government chose the G20 to break with diplomatic procedure and post on their ministry of foreign affairs website Japan’s Message to the United Kingdom and the European Union
The message notes 440,000 jobs in Europe that Japanese businesses have created:
A considerable number of these firms are concentrated in the UK. Nearly half of Japanese direct investment intended for the EU in 2015 flowed to the UK, and the UK was one of the major destinations for Japan’s investment stock within the EU as of the end of last year. While benefiting from the single market of the EU, Japanese businesses have contributed to the development of the European economy.
After two months of ‘Brexit means Brexit’, the Japanese businessmen told their foreign ministry exactly what they want from Britain and the Europe Union. They want what they were promised. That is ‘customs duty-free trade between the UK and the EU’.
Every vehicle driven aboard Undine in Southampton could suffer ‘levies imposed twice’ if the UK were to leave the Single Market.
Even classic British JCBs bound for Florida include continental components.
Back in June, Lord Anthony Bamford, chairman of JCB and a Brexiteer, said Britain had ‘little to fear from leaving the EU’, but in 2010, when less than half the components in a JCB were British-made, he admitted,
You couldn’t find people to make crankshafts, pistons, con rods, valves. These are the basic parts of engineering.
The Automotive Council gathered data in 2015 on the UK share of components in the 1.6 million vehicles and 2.5 million engines assembled in the UK in 2014:
Electronics 5%
Plastic granulate 10%
Machined metal components 13%
Stampings 19%
Steel 58%
Undine berthed in Halifax, Nova Scotia, on September 5, just after the Japanese ambassador in London, Koji Tsuruoka, talked on BBC Radio 4 about the future of 10,000 Japanese companies in Britain employing 140,000 people:
If there are conditions that block Japanese automakers’ cars from continental Europe, if the customs duties are imposed, that will of course affect the competitive nature of the pricing of the cars. Access is very important.
If the way Brexit ends up does not provide companies with the prospect of making sufficient profits to continue operating in the UK then of course all options are open to them.