Dyson’s move shows the Thatcherite dream of a free-market Brexit is dying
Pro-leave entrepreneurs despair at the squandering of this rare opportunity to radically reboot Britain
What was Sir James Dyson thinking? The decision by Britain’s most successful pro-brexit entrepreneur to choose such an inopportune moment to relocate the HQ of his eponymous empire to Singapore is a gift to the Remainer establishment. Symbolism is what matters in politics: the fact that only two employees are moving, and that Dyson is continuing to invest vast amounts in the UK, will go unnoticed. His critics will only remember that he is engineering his very own Dysexit, and the Leavers now have one fewer entrepreneur at their disposal to make the bullish case for post-brexit Britain.
Yet while the “optics” are bad – and Sir James maintains in our business section today that the move has nothing to do with Brexit – he is being ruthlessly consistent. The vision of Leave-supporting entrepreneurs like him came in two parts: a radical break with the EU, including single market regulations, and for the UK to rebuild its economy by encouraging wealth creation. Two and a half years after the referendum, the chances of getting either are receding: under Theresa May’s deal, even shorn of the backstop, we would remain subject to all kinds of heavy-handed rules. With the chances of a retro-socialist Jeremy Corbyn government also rising, Dyson must have felt compelled to take matters into his own hands.
He isn’t leaving because he’s changed his mind on the desirability of a real Brexit. He isn’t leaving because his company would be damaged by it: the impact of no deal would be trivial, given the location of his markets and production facilities. He isn’t relocating to the EU, or Norway: he isn’t seeking to remain part of the single market, let alone the customs union. He is moving his base to Singapore, that low-tax, ultra-competitive, pro-business citystate that is the one place Remainers desperately say they don’t want the UK to become like.
Yes, Singapore recently signed a trade deal with the EU, so its goods will face fewer barriers than the UK’S in the immediate aftermath of a no-deal exit. And Dyson was already planning to build his electric cars there. But it’s ridiculously Eurocentric to obsess over one deal with the EU. Dyson will be selling cars all over the world from Singapore, and in some cases will face barriers, yet the attractiveness of the country swamps everything else.
If they had any sense, the Tories would respond to Dyson’s decision by concluding that we are not Brexiting in a radical enough way and by redoubling their efforts to prevent a disastrous Corbyn government. It is an indictment not of Brexit itself but of how it is being ruined by those entrusted with implementing it.
I don’t know of a single pro-brexit business leader who is anything but despondent: they are aghast at Mrs May’s dithering, at the amateurishness of her dealings with the EU, at her almost deliberate talking down of the economy. They can barely believe how the Treasury and other Remain forces have failed to lay the groundwork for no deal, how they have done nothing to cut taxes or bolster competitiveness, how they hold that our regulations are perfect, and how a once-in-50year chance to engineer an economic renaissance is being squandered.
All are increasingly worried that we could be about to face a Corbyn government determined to confiscate swathes of corporate Britain, aided and abetted by rebel Tory MPS, the Government’s betrayal of Brexit voters and its pathetic inability to make the case for capitalism. Yet none of these entrepreneurs has suddenly embraced Remain. They are bearish on the UK because their dream of a rejuvenated, free-trading Britain is dying, sabotaged by an establishment in denial about the need to adopt an economic model fit for a globalised world.
It is not just Brexiteers who believe the UK is becoming uncompetitive. Gopichand Hinduja, a Remainer whose family controls a £20.6 billion fortune, thinks taxes are driving people away. “There used to be a lot of ease of doing business,” he says. “Now, with changes in tax – doms, non-doms – they have made so many complications that people don’t even know what returns they have to file,” he told The Sunday Telegraph. “I have found many of my rich friends – billionaires – have left London and become residents either in Dubai or Singapore or Lebanon.”
The tragic reality is that the free-market, low-tax Brexit backed by Thatcherites and libertarians no longer appears to be a likely outcome of the machinations of the next few weeks. If we do technically leave the EU, it will probably be through an adulterated variant of Mrs May’s dour, pessimistic, useless deal, one that means we end up saddled with much of the EU’S Acquis Communautaire. It will be a case of more managed decline, Eurozone-style.
In her Bruges speech, Lady Thatcher grounded her opposition to political integration in her support for individual freedom, bottom-up decision-making and free markets. “Just when those countries such as the Soviet Union, which have tried to run everything from the centre, are learning that success depends on dispersing power and decisions... there are some in the Community who seem to want to move in the opposite direction. We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them reimposed at a European level.”
These words launched a thousand Eurosceptic vessels: from that day on, most British free-marketeers became increasingly anti-eu; without that movement, the referendum would never have been called. If you want to know what could have been, if the right people had taken power after June 2016, rewatch Martin Durkin’s brilliant Brexit: The Movie. The documentary was shared like a modern-day Samizdat prior to the referendum; it didn’t mention immigration once, yet made a powerful case for the kind of capitalist Brexit that Thatcherites always dreamed of.
Is it all over? Or could we still end up with a radically liberalising Brexit that repositions Britain as an entrepot economy specialising in trade, technology, finance and science, a high-skilled hub that attracts wealth and talent, a link between East and West that encourages the next generation of Dysons to relocate to our shores, rather than flee? Yes, of course – but then, I do believe in miracles.