ANARCHY IN THE U.K.?
While much of the Brexit conversation has been reduced to fear-mongering, there’s still a lot to talk about,
Oliver Wainwright has a way with words. “They’re coming for our kettles and they’ve got their eyes on our toasters,” the architecture and design critic for the Guardian wrote tongue-in-cheek this week, finding his way into the Brexit debate via the European Union’s Ecodesign program.
Yes, the EU has an Ecodesign program aimed, as you would expect, at harmonized standards and the advancement of energy efficient appliances and such. In February the EU suddenly put its regulation plans on hold. “I understand that behind the decision to delay this legislation lies in Brexit and newspaper populism of the kind we saw with the toaster story,” a Member of European Parliament (MEP) said at the time.
The toaster story. Surely there’s no more appropriate easy-access metaphor for the U.K.’s decision as to whether it will yank its membership from the EU in its Thursday vote than tea and toast, part of what Wainwright deems the Leave campaign’s “pernicious narrative of nostalgia.”
He recalls the angry tweets of Leave’s David Coburn, Ukip MEP for Scotland. “My toaster takes four attempts before bread goes brown,” Coburn tweeted.
“My old toaster seemed to be powered by the Torness nuclear reactor . . . this one is powered by some kind of EU windmill.”
Wainwright had a lot of fun with the EU’s clearly devious plan to “castrate our kettles and turn down our toasters in a bid to save the environment.”
But behind the Leave campaign’s extreme torquing of populist sentiment lies the support of the most high-profile appliance maker in the land. James Dyson, the innovator behind the vacuum we have all heard about — and, chances are, can’t afford — has been among the most vocal U.K. business leaders on the Leave side.
Dyson founded his self-named vacuum company in 1993, so in a swift span of time he has built an appliance maker that now exports roughly 80 per cent of its product worldwide, with, he told the Telegraph, 19 per cent sold into Europe.
“We’re very pleased with the European market — we’re No. 1 in Germany and France,” he said in a Telegraph interview. “But it’s small and the real growing and exciting markets are outside Europe.”
It was with some surprise that I learned this past spring, having fallen into conversation with a Dyson employee in Southeast Asia, that the vacuum maker had years before moved its manufacturing to Malaysia at a cost of 500 U.K. jobs. What has stayed in Malmesbury, the little market town in the Cotswolds where Dyson set up shop, is the brain work. The “campus” model cleaves to the Silicon Valley design in which labour is sourced offshore to low-cost locales and the higherend jobs kept at home.
But, Dyson told the Telegraph, membership in the EU had proved an obstacle to building the high-end U.K. workforce he needs. “Sixty per cent of engineering graduates at British universities are from outside the EU, and 90 per cent of people doing research in science and engineering at British universities are from outside the EU,” he said. “We’re not allowed to employ them, unless they’re from the EU. At the moment, if we want to hire a foreign engineer, it takes four-and-a-half months to go through the Home Office procedure. It’s crazy.”
As for the potential negative trade impacts should the U.K. exit, Dyson summed his view up thusly: “Cobblers . . . If, as (Prime Minister) David Cameron suggested, they imposed a tariff of 10 per cent on us, we will do the same in return. We buy more from Europe than they buy from us, so we would be the net beneficiary and based on these numbers it would bring £10 billion into the U.K. annually.”
The latest report from the U.K. in a Changing Europe does an estimable job of assessing strengths and weaknesses of U.K. trade with the EU, the latter including barriers in the areas of professional and digital services and an overreliance on single-market trade at a time when the EU “may be stuck in a prolonged period of low growth.” The report cites Superdrug as one example of a powerful U.K brand that has struggled to find a footing in the union. (The pharmacy’s founder, Peter Goldstein, favours Brexit.)
The hysteria surrounding the vote has swept away such attempts at impartial analysis.
We can thank the likes of Boris Johnson for that and for allowing the immigration card to trump the deeply important considerations of what is most important economical- ly for the U.K. in the long run.
Almost forgotten is the endlessly long list of what makes the EU dysfunctional, from reams of red tape, to the barriers to small business, to overly demanding product labelling laws, to secrecy in operation, to the fact that the European Commission, which proposes EU legislation, is unelected.
British economist Paul Mason was much more pungent in his assessment. “The EU is not — and cannot become — a democracy. Instead, it provides the most hospitable ecosystem in the developed world for rentier monopoly corporations, tax-dodging elites and organized crime.”
He went on to itemize what he called “the principled left wing case for Brexit.” Then he explained the practical reason for ignoring it: “In two words: Boris Johnson . . . Johnson and the Tory right are seeking a mandate via the referendum to full-blown Thatcherism: less employment regulation, lower wages, fewer constraints on business.” Mason describes that future as a “neo-liberal fantasy land.”
It’s all a dreadful shame, seeing a moment of such historic importance reduced to the fear and arch ignorance of Johnson and his ilk. Especially, as Dyson’s views make clear, there were so many substantive issues to argue about. jenwells@thestar.ca