What the commentators said

Nissan’s decision will have been greeted with relief across the Northeast, said The Economist. Sunderland voted by a big majority for Brexit, but the carmaker’s withdrawal would have proved disastrous for a region that has endured “decades of stagnation”. The threat of a pullout was certainly real: about 60% of the vehicles produced in Sunderland go to Europe, and Nissan could face a 10% tariff on those exports. Nissan’s refusal “to retreat a single inch across the Channel” is all the more remarkable because Nissan is 43% owned by the French carmaker, Renault, and its CEO, Carlos Ghosn, is himself part-french, said Dominic Lawson in The Sunday Times. But credit belongs to the workforce as well as to Government dealmakers. Since opening in 1986, the plant hasn’t lost a single day to strike action, and rates as the most productive car plant in Europe. So it didn’t require “a colossal bribe” to keep the company in Britain. What reasonable business would abandon a factory that has become a “model for the entire industry globally”?

The Government isn’t saying exactly what inducements it offered to keep Nissan in Britain, said Patrick Wintour in The Guardian. But the episode does offer some strong clues as to its likely negotiating strategy with the EU: Greg Clark spoke openly about pursuing sector-by-sector deals to gain tariff-free access to Europe with a “minimum of bureaucratic hurdles”. Decoded, that means the single market is still a major objective, whatever the recent talk of “hard Brexit”. In fact, it seems clear enough that Theresa May must have given Ghosn some form of “firm commitment” on staying inside the single market when they met last month, said Wolfgang Münchau in the FT. Otherwise, it “makes no sense” for the company to build more cars here. Trouble is, the EU isn’t ready for the kind of “sector-specific” deal that Britain wants. The idea of “free movement of cars”, but not, say, of bicycles, is “a non-starter”. The Europeans have been quite clear: “In means In and Out means Out.”