Survey on small business is more scaremongering
HOW ironic that whenever the Guardian and the BBC put out one of their regular scare stories about customs delays after Brexit they illustrate it with photographs of lorries backed up for miles along the M20 – a huge queue that was caused by a dockworkers’ strike at Calais in 2015.
Isn’t that one of the reasons why Britain voted in 2016 to leave the EU – to free ourselves from an EU economy that has become hampered by poor labour relations?
The photographs have been doing the rounds again this week thanks to Ed Balls’s claim that small businesses are keen to stay in the EU customs union. The former shadow chancellor, who now has an academic post at Harvard, says he reached the conclusion after interviewing 80 small businesses.
Sorry, but it doesn’t strike me as an objective piece of academic research – more a case of Balls looking for evidence to confirm his own views. After all, 80 interviews is a tiny number when it comes to putting together an opinion poll.
Normally, polling companies use a sample many times that size – and even then they often get elections wrong. But for what they are worth, previous polls asking small businesses their views on Brexit have come up with very different results to Mr Balls’s study. A TNS survey of 500 small businesses just before the referendum in 2016, for example, found opinion on Brexit evenly divided.
THE poll didn’t ask specifically about the customs union but it did ask the business leaders if they were keen to stay in the single market – and only 38 per cent said they were. As for those who wanted to stay in the EU many cited their reason as concern over the effect on the price of European holidays, not on their business.
It would be extraordinary if small businesses really were as desperate to stay in the customs union as Balls infers – given that only about one in 10 of them exports anything to the EU. Even among those who do, there is a balance to be struck between any negative effect on cross-Channel trade and the opportunity to free ourselves of some of the more onerous EU regulations. Moreover