James Dyson’s back playing Brexit cheerleader while other firms deal with its bitter reality

A mega-bucks gazillionaire shooting his mouth off on national TV: just what we need in the middle of a pandemic. 

Yes, Sir James Dyson is back from his Singapore des res to spout off on Brexit and his reasons for quitting the country in a BBC interview at a time when most of us are still more or less bottled up in our homes.

“It gives us an independence of spirit,” he huffed. 

Come again? What’s this “us” you’re talking about there, Jimmy D? 

Most of “us” won’t be hopping on a plane at some point in the future to fly off to the far east where we relocated our business HQ away from Britain. 

Those among “us” with small businesses will instead have carried on trying to earn a crust here, in the midst of unprecedented difficulties. 

If a business trades with Europe, as a lot of smaller firms do – or at least, as a lot of them did – that’s now a hell of a lot more difficult thanks to the policy Dyson vents about in the manner of one of his overpriced and overrated (from personal experience) vacuum cleaners working in reverse.

The British government has erected a massive wall, one far more effective than anything Boris Johnson’s fellow traveller Donald Trump managed to get built. It’s one that locks people in, every bit as effectively as keeping them out.

That’s especially true of businesses, which is why the British Chambers of Commerce (BCC) earlier this week urged the UK government to get back round the table with the EU for fresh negotiations, to try to lower some of the barriers to trade created by the prime minister’s dismal Christmas Eve trade and cooperation agreement. 

Perhaps the Dyson boss missed this while he was in transit? 

The BCC’s call is understandable when you consider the enormous problems Brexit has left some of its members facing – problems which are having an all too real impact on their businesses.

This week it emerged that trade with the continent had recovered somewhat after the catastrophic 42 per cent fall recorded in January. “Look at that!” said the Brexiteers Sir James rides with, conveniently ignoring the reality, which is that exports were still 7 per cent lower in February than the average monthly total in the second half of 2020. 

Sure, Covid, of course. But when you dump a truckload of bureaucracy on top of people’s heads in addition to the virus, it’s naturally going to have an impact. 

The innovation that Sir James claims – without any evidence – has been boosted will largely have been directed towards filling in forms and finding the most efficient ways to work through a tangle of Brexit-related red tape, something that will have only a limited impact on his business – which is, in any case, big enough to be able to hire people to deal with any issues emerging from the whole sorry affair. 

Sir James went on to claim that the end of the UK’s transition period with the EU had enabled Dyson to hire the engineering talent it was lacking in the UK from around the world.

Thing is, there was nothing to stop the British government from allowing companies to hire globally pre-Brexit, when there was freedom of movement with the EU.

It just had to treat EU workers in the same way that British workers were treated on the continent at the time.

Sir James uses EU freedom of movement as a straw man, just as the Conservative government does regularly. 

As for the rationale for moving his HQ to Asia in the midst of the Brexit debate? He just vents a truckload of excuses, such as his suppliers here not wanting to expand with him (Oh please), forcing him to assemble his products overseas. So we’re supposed to give him a pass and accept his claim that his business is still British when it patently isn’t? Not any more. 

Sure, Dyson does still employ a lot of people here, and invests money. But let’s not kid ourselves. Its founder basically took advantage of everything this country offered him to get started and build a successful company, before hopping off abroad when it suited him, with an honour sitting in his back pocket and a enormous sense of entitlement along with it.

Mercifully, that isn’t true of every British business. Perhaps we should give them a little more attention rather than listening to the rantings of a tycoon who lives halfway around the world and wants us to thank him. 

His latest self-serving spiel does rather make one wish he’d stayed there.