The money that firms are being forced to spend in preparation for a potential no-deal Brexit next March is a waste, the director-general of the CBI has complained.
In a speech to the business lobby group’s 2018 conference on Monday Carloyn Fairbairn said “not one penny of it will create new jobs or products”.
“Brexit is consuming government – every politician, every civil servant. And it is also consuming British business,” she said.
“Our firms are spending hundreds of millions of pounds preparing for the worst case – and not one penny of it will create new jobs or new products.
“Investment is flooding out of the right areas like skills and tech, and into areas which do absolutely nothing to help our productivity. Some of it is leaving our country altogether. While other countries are forging a competitive future, Westminster seems to be living in its own narrow world, in which extreme positions are being allowed to dominate.”
Despite the almost universally hostile political reception for Theresa May’s draft Withdrawal Agreement with the European Union, unveiled last week, the CBI has called on MPs to back it since it avoids the risk of a cliff-edge for firms on 29 March 2019.
“The Prime Minister’s agreement is not perfect. It is a compromise. But it is hard-won progress,” said Ms Fairbairn.
A no-deal Brexit next March would be expected to ground UK flights and result in severe disruption of haulage deliveries through UK ports.
UK-based manufacturers and retailers which have “just-in-time” supply chains have warned of major problems in such circumstances and said that they have limited facilities for stock-piling.
Last week, Ms May told the House of Commons: “We can choose to leave with no deal, we can risk no Brexit at all, or we can choose to united and support the best deal that can be negotiated”.
In her speech, Ms Fairbairn again castigated Labour’s nationalisation plans, saying that when it was last tried in the 1970s “it ushered in one of the darkest periods in our country’s modern economic history”.
But she also had a message for those hardline Brexiteers who have presented leaving the EU as an opportunity for wholesale deregulation.
“Extreme market ideology does not get us much further. Becoming a hustling cowboy nation with minimal regulation is not what people want. Nor is it what business wants,” she said.
On immigration, Ms Fairbairn also rejected the recent advice from the independent Migration Advisory Committee that the Government should, post-Brexit, only allow in skilled workers who can command a salary of more than £30,000 and also the Governments pledge to reduce net migration to the tens of thousands.
“What has been proposed so far won’t work,” she said.
“The idea that anyone earning less than £30,000 can’t contribute to our economy, for instance. Together, we could do so much better – through a jointly developed immigration policy, one that avoids false choices, that does away with arbitrary targets, and focusses instead on the people we need to build our economy.”
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