Last nights final program about 'Made in Britian'.

Oct 15, 2019 Last reply: 6 years ago 9 Replies

Ed Balls and colleagues were looking at the car industry.



He was at Southampton docks when the massive car carrier was arriving from Zeebrugge.



Off came loads of BMW's and a LOT of minis.



Apparently quite a few are made in the Netherlands but are sold here as 'Made in the UK'.



I didn't realise that all the BMWs were given their PDI, electronically 'awoken' and given number plates at a place near the docks before going off to dealers.



Then there was a shot of 'British' Aston Martins heading abroad, except that the new model made at what was RAF St Athan now has a mercedes AMG engine and gearbox.


Probably means they fit the windscreen wipers here ...

Thing with the very easy movement of goods round the EU is parts of any car can be made in any EU country. No matter where it is assembled. And the UK has a large and successful parts industry - many quite small companies. Which will be at risk if things take a lot longer to move round Europe, or have tariffs applied to them.

You'd think it would have been more appropriate to fit the rear light units with their union flag design in this country.

we know that

but properly organised they shouldn't take longer to move around (at least not within the normal margin of error caused by ferry./Eurotunnel cancellation and traffic jams)

and with the, very much desired by all parties, FTA they wont have tariffs applied to them (if they do anyway [1])

The problem of leaving is with making sure that there is a workable transition, everything else is fixable and will NOT affect EU-UK trade long term

tim

[1] it is usual for components to be tariff free whilst tariffs are applied to finished goods. This encourage final assembly to take place in you own county whilst recognising that it's next to impossible to have a local supply chain for every single component.

You mean just like we already have with being in the EU?

But then I'd guess you still think we can cherry pick the bits we want out of that and reject the rest.

Good luck.

BBC anti-Brexit propaganda. As to be expected.

^^^^ There's your problem :-/

Yup. Brexiteers do often have a simple answer to everything. Which generally means they don't understand the problem. Nor wish to.

if you've be watching the program about the channel tunnel, you will have learnt that they have spent 13 million pounds implementing a scheme to check lorries documentation is correct, which does not add to the time that they already stop the lorries for for checking for illegal's (though obviously requires extra staff)

tim

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