What the commentators said

Now we know why the Government was “so keen to keep Greg Clark’s letter to Nissan under wraps”, said Nils Pratley in The Guardian. It’s an embarrassment. In vowing that Nissan’s UK factories would not be “adversely affected” by Brexit, the Business Secretary was “making promises he couldn’t underwrite”. Now, two months before the UK is meant to leave the EU, he still can’t say what trading terms might apply. “The foolishness has been exposed.” And let’s not forget why Nissan came here in the first place, said Ben Chu in The Independent. In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher practically begged it to set up a plant in Sunderland, promising “a smorgasbord of public subsidies to make it happen”. The irony is that at that time, France and Germany were hell-bent on stopping Japan’s car firms securing a bridgehead into the Common Market. Yet neither then nor in 2016, when Clark made his promises, did Brussels step in to prevent such state aid to industry. So much for the Brexiter complaint that Brussels dictates our industrial strategy. It is the UK that has betrayed Nissan, not the other way round.

But blaming Brexit for Nissan’s decision is “disingenuous”, said Alex Brummer in the Daily Mail. The fact is that the internal combustion engine, which has “reigned supreme for more than a century”, is under huge threat from regulators and politicians “seeking to reduce pollution and global warming”. A new generation of electric carmakers such as Tesla and Dyson are disrupting the car market and, as a result, traditional manufacturers are “frantically engaged in the biggest re-engineering of production since the introduction of the Ford Model T in 1908”. But Britain’s decision to leave the EU’S single market will undoubtedly affect their decisions about where to produce the new models, said The Economist. Whatever the terms of Britain’s exit, they will surely favour a location within a large trade bloc – with its interlocking supply chains – over one in a country that has decided to lie outside it.