Nothing to fear from a no deal, says Next chief
REMAINERS believe that a no-deal Brexit will be far worse than it actually would be, Lord Wolfson, head of the Next clothes shops chain said yesterday. But in fact there is nothing to fear, he insisted.
The chief executive said Project Fear claims of a disaster as a result of no deal were being made by people “who are not traders”.
He described the warnings as “a lot of catastrophisation.”
The peer, who chairs the pro-Brexit Open Europe group, pointed out that, for example, claims of disruption at ports were “simply not right”.
His comments came as 60 senior Tory MPs signed a letter to Chancellor Philip Hammond demanding that he explains the workings behind the Project Fear claims coming out of the Treasury.
Lord Wolfson said: “I don’t think no deal is a disaster. It’s not my preferred outcome. I would much rather have a free-trade agreement with Europe but it’s not a disaster.
“What we mustn’t do is be so scared of it that we don’t prepare for it. The most important thing is that we are ready for no deal.” But he warned that the Government is not ready for it yet.
He went on: “Most people making these predictions are not traders.” He said he did not believe “for one second” the eight per cent hit to the economy predicted by the Treasury.
“It makes a number of assumptions about what happens at borders that are not right. For example, a lot of our product comes from outside Europe, it spends no longer than an hour in customs, it goes straight through, there are no checks and it goes into a bonded warehouse. The idea that customs needs to be a huge friction for trade is simply not right.” He argued that as businesses already collect VAT for the Government they can just as easily collect tariffs.
He said: “We trust firms to collect £125billion per annum on VAT and they don’t stand by tills to do so. So we can trust them to collect £3.5billion of customs.” He also made it clear that scaremongering over a hike in the price of products was false. He called on ministers to say what they will do about tariffs on products coming into the UK.
Speaking on BBC TV he pointed out that by bringing the EU into the group of nations paying tariffs the UK could lower the rate for clothes from 12 to six per cent.
“That means that the price of clothes will not go up,” he added. Meanwhile, the letter to Mr Hammond, signed by more than 60 Tory MPs – including former Cabinet ministers Iain Duncan Smith, Owen Paterson, and Priti Patel – warns that the public are “battered and bewildered by conflicting predictions of the future path of the economy following Brexit, fuelling a growing suspicion that Whitehall is engaging in what is apparently known internally as ‘policy-based evidencemaking’.”
The letter was also signed by Tory donors including David Ord, businessmen Sir Rocco Forte and Daniel Hodson and economists Professor Patrick Minford and Douglas MacWilliams.