The Tory leadership campaign got underway in earnest on Monday with 11 MPs vying to replace Mrs May as leader of the party and Prime Mininster. One candidate who was actively campaigning for a further referendum, Sam Gyimah, quickly withdrew, leaving ten contenders with a range of chances of progressing. All of the remaining candidates are committed to “delivering Brexit” with Boris Johnson, Andrea Leadsome and Dominic Raab committed to leaving on or before 31/10/19 with, or without a deal. The rest are more ambivalent about accepting a further extension, but all are claiming that they can improve (from their perspective) the deal that May and the EU struck. The problem is that the EU has said that negotiations have ended and the May deal is the only possible orderly exit from the EU.
Against this backdrop, representatives of UK manufacturers has given the starkest of warnings to the Brexit Committee. Seamus Nevin, the chief economist with Make UK, an organisation representing some of the UK’s biggest manufacturers spoke bluntly: “There is a direct link between politicians talking up the prospect of no deal and British firms losing customers overseas and British people losing jobs. A no-deal Brexit would be nothing short of commercial suicide.” He told the committee that some UK businesses were already downsizing or completely shuttering their UK concerns, some of them were leaders in the manufacturing sector and very profitable, but had taken the decisions due to political uncertainty. He cited an unnamed firm planning to cease UK manufacture, noting: “That will result in several thousand job losses”. He went on to say that a no deal Brexit “would be nothing short of an act of economic vandalism, undoing 25 years of economic progress and consign a generation of highly skilled workers to the scrapheap”.
Another representative giving evidence to the committee, Tim Rycroft COO of the Food and Drink federation, predicted that shortages would emerge within two weeks of the UK crashing out of the EU. Obligatory food health checks on poultry, fresh fruit and vegetables on goods using the Dover-Calais ferry crossing would be held up. Rycroft told the committee that: “We produce a lot of chicken but they are sent to EU for processing and then re-imported. We will see selective shortages and probably unpredictably and that might go on for several weeks and potentially months after a no-deal exit.” Items such as bread, foodstuffs and confectionery would be in short supply as the UK does not meet its own needs for dried milk or high-protein wheat.
Nevin remarked that a trial of sanitary and phytosanitary tests in the port of Calais had generated long delays, suggesting that Calais could not deliver a frictionless Brexit in the event of a chaotic exit.
The DUP’s Sammy Wilson, a member of the committee, said: “So the assurances given by the mayor of Calais are not true?”
“That’s correct,” Nevin replied.