BREXIT is “consuming” UK business, with firms spending hundreds of millions of pounds on worst-case preparations and investment flooding out of skills and technology and leaving the country, the Confederation of British Industry’s director-general has warned.
Carolyn Fairbairn offered her stark assessment, and flagged again the danger of a no-deal Brexit by accident, at the CBI’s annual conference in London yesterday.
She said: “Brexit is consuming government – every politician, every civil servant. And it is also consuming British business. Our firms are spending hundreds of millions of pounds preparing for the worst case – and not one penny of it will create new jobs or new products. Investment is flooding out of the right areas like skills and tech, and into areas which do absolutely nothing to help our productivity. Some of it is leaving our country altogether.”
Ms Fairbairn added: “While other countries are forging a competitive future, Westminster seems to be living in its own narrow world, in which extreme positions are being allowed to dominate. The result is a high-stakes game of risk, where the outcome could be an accidental no-deal. Surely we can do better than this.”
She declared that the draft Brexit deal approved by the UK Government and European Union was “not perfect” but believed it did represent “progress”.
Mrs May announced last Wednesday night that her Cabinet had agreed the draft Withdrawal Agreement.
However, this was followed last Thursday by the resignations of Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union Dominic Raab, Work and Pensions Secretary Esther McVey, Northern Ireland minister Shailesh Vara and junior Brexit minister Suella Braverman. These latest departures have underlined the depth of the divisions within the Conservative Party over Brexit.
Ms Fairbairn said: “The Prime Minister’s agreement is not perfect. It is a compromise. But it is hard-won progress.”
She added: “This is not a time to go backwards because there are so many other challenges we need to respond to: the robotics revolution, the rise of China, climate change, rising inequality, global protectionism. These are the forces that will shape our future.”
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Ms Fairbairn declared, in a world of uncertainty, “ideology can too often fill the void”.
She added: “We’ve seen it – and not just in the Brexit debate. Radical ideas are being put forward, and some offer genuine solutions. But others risk harming the very people who place their hope in them. If any idea is to succeed, it must be done with business, not done to business.”
The answer was “not to resurrect old, failed ideologies from the past”, she argued.
She added: “Our message to those advocating re-nationalisation is: talk to business about the problems you want to fix.”
Ms Fairbairn said “extreme market ideology does not get us much further”.
She added: “Becoming a hustling cowboy nation with minimal regulation is not what people want. Nor is it what business wants.”
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Ms Fairbairn also called for the UK’s future immigration policy to focus on “the people we need to build our economy”.
She said: “The Government is about to do something it has not done for 40 years: set the UK’s own, independent immigration policy. It’s an opportunity, but it’s also a great responsibility. And what has been proposed so far won’t work – the idea that anyone earning less than £30,000 can’t contribute to our economy for instance.
“Together, we could do so much better – through a jointly developed immigration policy, one that avoids false choices, that does away with arbitrary targets, and focuses instead on the people we need to build our economy.”
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