EXPORT BOOM OUTSIDE EU
BRITAIN is exporting a record amount to countries outside the crisis-hit European Union, it was revealed yesterday.
Leave campaigners said the official £14billion export figure was proof the country is less dependent than ever on the rest of the EU.
It emerged as one of the UK’s most successful entrepreneurs insisted Britain can ‘stand on its own two feet’.
Lord Bamford, the billionaire chairman of JCB, said in an open letter to his 6,000 UK staff that the country ‘has little to fear’ from cutting ties with Brussels and that his company and the whole of the UK ‘will prosper just as much outside the EU’.
His intervention electrified the Leave campaign and came as data from the Office for National Statistics showed that the UK exported more to the rest of the world than the EU for the 20th month in a row – defying warnings that the UK cannot survive on its own.
ONS figures also showed that Britain bought far more from its EU neighbours than they bought from us.
Imports from countries such as Germany, France, Italy and Belgium jumped to a record £20.1billion in April – a monthly increase of £1billion.
UK households are continuing to prop up the ailing EU economies by buying Spanish olive oil, Italian clothes and French wine. Eurosceptics hailed the figures as proof that EU countries are more and more reliant on the UK to buy goods – making a mockery of threats that Europe will impose swingeing tariffs on British exports if it goes it alone.
Professor Patrick Minford, a former adviser to Lady Thatcher and co-chairman of Economists for Brexit, said last night: ‘These figures clearly demonstrate that we are a global trading nation. They also show why the EU cannot afford to impose trade tariffs on the UK because they sell so much to us.’
The UK exported £14billion of goods and services to non-EU countries in April, up £1.3billion in a month. During the same period £12.2billion was exported to the EU. The last time Britain sold more to the EU than the rest of the world was in August 2014.