A leading Conservative Brexiter has accused the head of Jaguar Land Rover of inventing dire consequences for his company of a no-deal Brexit, saying people no longer believed the “scaremongers” in the debate.
Bernard Jenkin, the MP for Harwich and North Essex and a member of the European Research Group (ERG) collection of hard-Brexit-backing Tories, said Ralf Speth, the chief executive of Britain biggest car manufacturer, should not be worried about border delays after Brexit.
Speaking last week at an event also addressed by Theresa May, Speth said in the event of a no-deal Brexit, the company’s factories could grind to a halt and “tens of thousands” of jobs could be lost in the sector.
He said the company was committed to the UK but warned a hard Brexit would cost it £1.2bn a year, wiping out profits: “What decisions will we be forced to make if Brexit means not merely that costs go up, but that we cannot physically build cars on time and on budget in the UK?”
Asked about the comments on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Jenkin said: “I’m afraid I think he’s making it up. We’ve had figures made up all the time by the scaremongers in this debate, and I’m afraid nobody believes them.”
He was speaking as May told the BBC that her Chequers plan was the only viable proposal for Brexit, adding: “I think that the alternative to that will be having no deal”.
In an interview for Panorama, extracts of which have been released in advance, the prime minister condemned the ERG’s solution to the Irish border issue published last week, saying any system of checks is “still a hard border”.
She said: “You don’t solve the issue of no hard border by having a hard border 20km inside Ireland.”
Jenkin said he believed the ERG’s proposals were being taken seriously in Brussels: “She’s not engaged with our proposal, and it seems the EU is engaging with our proposal.”
He also stressed that hard Brexiters would continue to battle Chequers: “Let’s be clear, Chequers does not take back control. We’re all agreed that leaving the EU meant taking back control of our laws and leaving the single market.
“Chequers keeps us in parts of the single market, and subject to what they call the common rule book, which is the EU rule book.”
Asked about Speth’s warnings about border delays, Jenkin said it was possible to have “drive-through borders, where checks are done at the plants, at the warehouse from which they’re being exported. You don’t have to have queues and checks at the border. And we’re talking about tiny delays”.
He added: “There are just-in-time supply chains across the Canada-US border, there are just-in-time supply chains from outside the UK into the UK across customs frontiers.”
And Jenkin said no deal would be better than May’s plan: “No deal would be preferable to the Chequers proposals, because we would instantly be free, we would save substantially on the payments that the EU wants us to make during the implementation period.
“There will be some small disruption, perhaps, to begin with, but of course it will be in everyone’s interests to get everything working as quickly as possible.”
