I said this before Brexit but it was poo pooed. It's hard to fly a plane without wings!!
Airbus has warned of a “dangerous new phase” as it faces the twin threat of Brexit and the policies of the Trump administration.
Gee, who'da thunk it?
Tom Williams, chief operating officer and president of commercial aircraft at the European company, told MPs on the Treasury select committee that it would be “pretty scary” if Airbus were no longer able to operate a successful UK business with the ability to seamlessly move goods and people around the European Union.
Right because we're such an insignificant little nothing of a country who needs the EU more than we need them.... Yep I got that one a year ago.
Williams suggested the US and its arch-rival, Boeing, would be ready to take full advantage of any negative fallout from Brexit suffered by Airbus
Well I never. Who could have worked that out? All those mandarins telling the UK "the way it's going to be", when their prize baby plane making organisation is under some serious threat. Did it _really_ take them this long to work out what Trump was saying? Or did they just not believe him???
Then comes the sting. Oh we have to be good brexiters and make sure we do everything to keep open trade, no matter what the cost, because we'll lose the business.
“So when we come towards the end of this decade when there are perhaps bigger decisions about longer term product policy, and next investments, then it could become a deciding factor.”
Let's see. Airbus employs 15,000 people in the UK and repatriates it's profit back to France and Germany. The UK sees very little of the benefit of this besides the jobs and does not share in the profits.
So the company tells us that it will be "very challenging" to operate if the UK does not have a good brexit deal and that the US will take advantage. Yep that will happen immediately. Then they say they'll rethink their investments in the future if we don't capitulate.
There is only one little problem with that. They don't make those wings and fly them to France to be assembled because they think it's a real hoot and spending that money would be a great idea. They do it because the knowledge and expertise to make these wings is consolidated in the UK. Those 15,000 people constitute a significant body of knowledge and skills that can't just be pulled up and moved to Europe easily.
The article starts out talking about how badly Brexit will impact Airbus in the short term, right now, then it morphs into some attempt to tell us that we must capitulate or lose the business.....
If I were in Government I'd be championing using that experience to make our own British passenger planes and stuff airbus. Even more competition as it were.
But I'm not. So we shall see what we shall see. However I suspect that Airbus will be putting an even stronger case to the EU about negotiations than it is currently making to the UK. Given that the vast majority of it's 72,000 staff are in France, Germany and Spain.
This is all getting quite interesting. Before it was all about how much the UK could be pressured because it would all be BAD for the UK. Now it's morphing into something else.
