How the EU helped us to sell off our economy

Scarcely had Theresa May promised “much tougher scrutiny of foreign takeover bids for British companies” than she was drawn into the row over the £24 billion Japanese bid for ARM Holdings, the Cambridge-based firm which designs electronic chips used worldwide in mobile phones.

It was then revealed that ARM’s chairman was also responsible for the unfortunate sale to Japan of another world-ranking British company, Pilkington Glass. The Government’s only response to the ARM bid is that “it is a great vote of confidence in Britain”.

The unique ease with which foreign firms have been able to buy into the British economy has been an occasional theme of this column since, in the Nineties, I followed the story of the EU’s infamous “bus directive”. Lobbied for in Brussels by German bus manufacturers, this has had such a devastating effect on our own bus industry that virtually all our once iconic London buses (like our trains) are now made by German or Spanish companies.

How symbolic it was that, in the referendum campaign, the “battle buses” used by David Cameron and Boris Johnson were made in Germany and Poland.

In 2006 I described the tax-dodge which, despite being declared illegal by the European Commission, enabled Spanish firms to buy up all our major airports, including Heathrow and Gatwick, our fifth-largest bank, Abbey, and three London Tube lines.

In 2013 I explained the scandal whereby 12 of our 19 leading water companies were now owned by foreign investors based in tax havens, allowing them to avoid paying tax on the billions of pounds a year profit they earn from their British customers.

Our car industry, like what remains of our steel industry, is now largely owned by Indian, Japanese and German firms. Five of our six leading power companies are foreign-owned, as are almost all our offshore windfarms, to which we pay subsidies of 200 per cent for their power.

And we are still begging the French state-owned EDF to provide us, now for £30 billion, with easily the most expensive nuclear power station in the world, to a design so inefficient that it may never be built.

During the referendum campaign a disillusioned businessman circulated a document listing an array of famous firms, most now foreign-owned, which had moved all or part of their manufacturing abroad, either to eastern Europe or further afield, with the help of grants and loans from the EU. They included Cadbury, Jaguar Land Rover, Dyson, Hoover, ICI, Ford, Gillette, Metal Box, Boots and many others.

Clever analysts may suggest we should not worry too much about exporting vast numbers of manufacturing jobs to countries where labour is much cheaper, because 80 per cent of our economy is now service-based and our future lies in those “knowledge-based industries” where we are still a world leader.

But this is precisely why foreign firms are so keen to “buy British”. Hence the appeal of ARM Holdings to the Japanese and why 39 per cent of patents on British inventions have now passed into foreign ownership.

And what does it say for London’s claim to be the financial centre of the world that we are even willing to sell off our Stock Exchange to Germany, so that it can be run from Frankfurt?