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Car industry investment plummets in UK
- spants 7y agoIf the £1bn investment from Jaguar-Land Rover IS included, then investment is on a par with 2017 and better than 2018. Also, this is the real story: Spoiler: It's not Brexit https://www.businessinsider.com/automobile-car-industry-production-global-recession-2019-2?r=US&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/automobile-car-industry-prod...
- dpwm 7y agoIf not to do with brexit, why are three of the six examples in the UK? It's disproportionately represented.
- ptah 7y agoit will count toward the subsequent six months figures
- kalekold 7y agoThe BBC is notoriously biased against Brexit.
- johneth 7y agoReality is notoriously biased against Brexit.
- krona 7y agoExcept in reality, Brexit hasn't actually happened.
- gambiting 7y agoOk, what name would you use for this 3-year long period between the vote and the planned exit date where the damage is already being done as a result of the brexit vote?
- benj111 7y agoPurgatory.
- boudin 7y agoIt stills has an impact on investment. Having no visibility around the future relationship between the UK and all the countries around the UK is not that great for planning...
- pjc50 7y agoIf anything they've been pro-Brexit for years in inviting Farage on to talk far more than any other minor party figure, especially one who's not an MP.
- tonyedgecombe 7y agoNot from what I've seen, they have had a stream of people promoting Brexit going unchallenged.
- ealexhudson 7y agoYou can't compare total annual industry investment to a single manufacturer project cost. JLR are not going to be investing £1bn in a single year; and they've just been handed a £500M loan guarantee - if stuff doesn't work out, the taxpayer will be holding a significant chunk of the bag. You can certainly argue that Brexit isn't the sole cause, but it's definitely a large factor. While the overall market for cars is declining, the switch from ICE to electric should actually stoke demand. Some of the most productive car manufacturing plants in the EU are located in the UK and either being closed or are in danger of closing; if Brexit played no part then it would make no fiscal sense to close British plants.
- imeron 7y agoI guess Brexit is a great blame if you want to close a factory. Even-though, after-Brexit UK won't be part of the EU. A UK factory will export cars to the EU with mandatory customs fee and taxes. If your cars have to clear customs anyway why not build them in Ukraine?
- tonyedgecombe 7y agoActually I think most companies are going out of their way to avoid blaming Brexit. No point in alienating 52% of the UK market even if it is the case.
- benj111 7y agoIf you look at the case of Japan, they've just signed a free trade agreement with the EU, so at the same time barriers are going down there, barriers are going up in the UK. Given that the Japanese car companies only came to the UK to access the single market, why would they stay now that Japan is 'closer'?
- toyg 7y agoMost of the companies actually don't mention Brexit in public communications, because they are trying to avoid alienating the government (as much as half their UK customers). They were hoping to have the public purse cover their trouble and continue with business as usual. In the end, only Jaguar-LandRover (arguably the more "British" manufacturer) seems to have partially managed to pull that off with a 500m loan; everyone else (even Nissan, who supposedly got some guarantees in writing from the previous administration) decided it's not worth the trouble and is in the process of slowly divesting.
- Zenst 7y agoIndeed, brexit (though America don't call independence day Amexit!) for many hasn't happened and what we have is a case of still being in the EU and many trying to chuck everything in the way to keep us there. So really it's more how the leave process is being derailed left and left-again, that has and does cause the issue. After all, until it happens, everything is based upon perception and pushing a doom picture utterly suits those who wish to not leave the EU. Put another way, nobody blamed joining the EU for the demise of way more manufacturing and indeed the coal industry. Yet that is what happened. Cheaper EU coal imports, then eventual erosion of manufacturing bit by bit. But that gets overlooked oddly enough. Still the UK shifted from manufacturing to services, albeit many EU trade deals and indeed their own members, kinda fall foul in how they handle services with the EU actually looking at punishing members for not opening up their services market. But in fairness, whilst the EU is not perfect - nothing is perfect.
- toyg 7y agoThe two things (brexit and sector problems) compound. Without Brexit, a sector crisis might have resulted in one company closing a UK plant and another closing a plant elsewhere, weighting specific pros and cons case-by-case. With Brexit, they both close a UK plant, because it’s now a no-brainer. The UK after Brexit will have high labor costs AND high tariffs on goods’ movement. There is almost no reason to manufacture here. Brexit is a massive hole in the UK appeal for manufacturing that targets the EU market. This is a hard fact. Everything else is wishful thinking.
- krona 7y agoGiven the exchange rate over the past 25 years, it's quite remarkable that the UK has any manufacturing base whatsoever.
- toyg 7y agoIndeed, it almost doesn’t. Before Brexit, the sector was constantly crying for help; the car industry itself almost disappeared in the ‘80s, before the government explicitly targeted it. When Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader of the opposition Labour party, pre-Brexit referendum, one of his main rallying cries was about rebuilding a real manufacturing sector; there is almost no word of that anymore, unsurprisingly - now it’s all about maintaining current levels of economic activity, which we’ll be lucky to do.
- pjc50 7y agoThe UK's remaining manufacturing is high value-add, and much of it is also on a smaller scale than mass car production. The UK satellite industry does very well, for example. We need to appreciate what our real strengths and weaknesses are, and huge armies of semi-skilled workers assembling things are not going to be one of them.
- benj111 7y ago"The UK after Brexit will have high labor costs" If/when the £ goes down the toilet (even more) labour will be cheap.
- MagnumOpus 7y ago(a) 2017 and 2018 were also post-brexit-referendum years with investments getting pulled left and right (b) The £1bn will be spread over many years, almost none of it this year. (c) Low global car demand leads to reduced investment. The investments that get cut first are the ones where labour is already expensive, skilled labour is about to get much harder to get and supply chains are about to be screwed up massively. Guess where that is.
- pmontra 7y agoWhen things turn ugly the weakest suffer the most. With the Brexit, hard or soft, the UK is positioning itself as a weaker country than it was inside the EU. If the car industry is going to suffer, it's going to suffer more in the UK than in the EU. Obviously it could turn out that Brexit will be good for the UK, but IMHO not in the immediate future. It will take time.
- growlist 7y agoI think plenty of people that voted Leave put other concerns - identity, sovereignty, community etc - above the strictly economic. And why shouldn't they? We don't only live for money, do we?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- dsfyu404ed 7y agoI agree with you in principal but Brexit wasn't a direct economics vs sovereignty trade-off. It's not clear that the UK will actually benefit in the categories you mentioned as a result of Brexit.
- growlist 7y agoI'm not arguing on the rationality or otherwise, just saying that the dry economic arguments aren't necessarily the ones that have traction with voters. I don't think that's a controversial thing to say. On those other issues I would say it's more subtle, in that leaving the EU at least opens the door to genuine controls on migration, for example, but the major parties are united in their refusal to offer the choice to the public.
- pjc50 7y ago> genuine controls on migration Can you be extremely clear on what you mean by this, and what you expect to achieve by restricting migration of EU nationals to the UK and UK nationals to the EU? And also acknowledge that the UK's controls on non-EU migration are extremely onerous and not a matter of EU policy?
- onion2k 7y agoThat investment is actually a loan backed by the British government to the tune of £500m - https://www.am-online.com/news/manufacturer/2019/07/16/jlr-s-ev-production-plans-underwritten-by-uk-taxypayers https://www.am-online.com/news/manufacturer/2019/07/16/jlr-s... - in other words, it's less an investment by a company that believes in investing in the UK but rather the government buying some good news. Without government stumping up the loan guarantee it wouldn't have happened.
- billpg 7y agoIt's not Brexit! It's not Brexit! It's not Brexit! La la la la I can't hear you!
- baggsie 7y agoWe must all believe harder!
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- herendin2 7y agoIt's Brexit, but I flagged this. Please don't post unsubstantive comments.
- benj111 7y agoHow would you succinctly sum up what many people were thinking? Saying it is Brexit isnt really any more substantive but doesn't seem to be a flaggable offense, so the only crime seems to be humour, which seems to be an entirely reasonable way of dealing with the situation.
- iagovar 7y agoThis is not reddit.
- de_watcher 7y agoYea, HN just needs a little bit of elitism and we're gucci.
- billpg 7y agoLa la la la I can't... oh never mind.
- rezeroed 7y agoEU manufacturing is in trouble, also China slowdown.
- growlist 7y agoThe BBC in 2019: ignores the the barbaric suppression of the Gilets Jaunes protests; gives comprehensive coverage on the protests in Hong Kong. Treat with scepticism.
- toby- 7y agoYou're kidding, right? The BBC have extensively covered the gilets jaunes, including the response of the police and government. They've interviewed protesters, interviewed police, written lengthy articles examining the cause(s) of the protests, and indeed published articles covering the police's tactics throughout the events. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/yellow_vests https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/yellow_vests https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-48154777 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-48154777 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-46917989 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-46917989 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-48983089 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-48983089 etc. You can find hundreds of additional articles. It's absurd how more and more frivolous and meritless these attacks on the BBC are becoming as time goes on. One further point. You may not be referring to this, but the claim the BBC were suppressed from covering the protests was a debunked claim originating on 4chan (https://metro.co.uk/2019/01/28/bbc-ordered-stop-reporting-yellow-vest-protests-8402611/ https://metro.co.uk/2019/01/28/bbc-ordered-stop-reporting-ye...).
- samdoidge 7y agoYour links are months old. The Hong Kong protests have much great coverage on the front page than the protests in France currently.
- toyg 7y agoThat's simply because they are much fresher. Otherwise the Israel/Palestine conflict would be on the front page every single day.
- toby- 7y agoOf course they are mostly older articles; the protests have dwindled to the mere hundreds, down from over 300,000 nationwide. During the height of the protests, they were covered extensively by the BBC -- it's misleading to criticise their coverage with "BBC in 2019". The BBC's latest article, which I linked, was 14 July. The BBC aren't alone in this: it's also the most recent French protest to be covered by Reuters, CNN, and other major news organisations. The Hong Kong protests are still a major, significant event. The French protests have dwindled and are no longer as relevant.
- Merrill 7y agoA healthy steel industry would seem to be fundamental to having a healthy auto industry. But the UK's steel industry is in trouble as well. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/may/22/what-went-wrong-at-british-steel https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/may/22/what-went-w... "The UK steel industry has been in decline for some time because of a variety of factors such as overcapacity in EU steelmaking and Chinese state-subsidised firms flooding the global market with cheap product. An industry that employed 323,000 people in 1971 now employs less than a tenth of that, at 31,900. The closure of the Redcar steelworks in 2015 was a significant blow to the sector and left the UK with only two blast furnace steelworks, which make steel from raw materials: Scunthorpe and Tata Steel-owned Port Talbot in south Wales. There are also four electric arc furnaces in the UK, which make products from recycled steel. There are three of these sites in Sheffield and one in Cardiff."
- mytailorisrich 7y agoIt's worth noting that the EU wanted to impose (higher?) tariffs on Chinese steel because of state subsidies and dumping. One country led a campaign against it... The UK. Then both Scunthorpe and Port Talbot areas voted in favour of Brexit.
- Zenst 7y agoWasn't this 14 countries and about the "lesser duty" rules? However some articles do paint different pictures with the same facts - for example https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/apr/01/steel-crisis-uk-accused-blocking-eu-attempts-regulate-chinese-dumping https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/apr/01/steel-crisi... makes it sound like it was all the UK's fault based upon opinion. However, reading non-left learning media upon the same facts yields a different picture. Though I may of missed something - please could you point a source that shows that the UK was the only country to vote to keep cheap Chinese steel imports? Asking as I thought this was actually 14 countries, and about some import duty rule that covers many things above and beyond, cheap steel.
- mytailorisrich 7y ago
- rezeroed 7y agoThis post is blatant anti-brexit trolling.
- rezeroed 7y agoI rest my case.
- exergy 7y agoYou're getting downvoted for making a stupid comment with little to back it, not because you're a martyr who braved the downvotes in order to make sure the truth would out.
- dang 7y agoPlease don't break the site guidelines, regardless of the comment you're replying to. It only makes this place even worse. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- hordeallergy 7y agoNot everyone has an interest in karma.
- blaser-waffle 7y agoIndeed! Some of us are PAID to shill