No-deal Brexit may doom Nissan’s Sunderland plant as reality belatedly bites

The cheerleaders for no-deal Brexit now have an image to splash across their flags: picture a red, white and blue Nissan Qashqai hatchback being driven coldly and deliberately off a cliff. Splash.

Nissan, which also makes the electric Leaf, and the Juke, in Sunderland, has signalled that its plant there may be done if the UK fails to strike a trade deal with the EU.

Well, duh. Suddenly finding your exports face the application of 10 per cent tariffs that previously weren’t there is obviously going to cause a problem.

It’s going to cause a problem for just about every business that sells into the bloc.

Some Brexity rube once had the gall to say people were “excited” about a so-called WTO Brexit, with which those tariffs go hand in hand and where it now looks like we’re headed.

I initially figured he just had a lot of Facebook friends who were left breathless with anticipation at the prospect of having rusty nails stabbed into their hands.

But it’s true, there are some people who genuinely may have cause to be thrilled at the prospect: those working at JobCentre Plus outlets. They’ll be part of the northeast’s biggest growth industry if it arrives.

Sunderland recently survived a bout of Nissan global bloodletting because, and the point bears repeating, it’s a mightily impressive operation. It is modern, efficient, well run, which is why CEO Ashwani Gupta says he’d like to keep it even though it seems unlikely that Renault, to which Nissan is allied, will take up the opportunity to utilise the spare capacity there.

Trouble is, Nissan was in a tough spot even before the coronavirus pandemic crashed into the global economy, bringing business to a grinding halt. Thanks to the British government’s obduracy, the option may not be open to him.

For goodness sake, extend the blasted transition period already, many of the government’s opponents (and even some of its supporters) have been saying. That way 7,000 jobs and tens of thousands more in supply chains, will be OK.

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer hasn’t been among them because he’s smart and knows they’ve got this wrong.

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Their line of attack is understandable in that such a move would be pragmatic and sensible, particularly given the economic instability wrought by the virus. A rational administration governing in the national interest would have done it by now.

Yet the extension, however rational, isn’t the real issue here.

In the absence of a complete volte face, which won’t happen, a trade deal, or a no-deal Brexit, would at some point have to emerge from it.

What makes the latter all too likely is the strategy adopted by Boris Johnson & Co. It basically amounts to them shaking their fists across the English Channel and loudly exclaiming “do what we want or we’ll stomp off in a huff”. It is this that has most likely prompted the warning from Nissan.

The government is still wedded to an ideology that insists Britain holds “all the cards”, to quote Michael Gove, and that it will damage the EU more than Britain if it walks away through failing to secure something to its liking. When the EU realises this, it will surely come back, bowing and scraping before the Pax Britannica, which will then go sailing off into the sunset in a brand new free-tradin’ royal yacht Britannia.

This is, of course, a fantasy. Yet another example of magical thinking.

Unfortunately, extending the transition isn’t going to change it. It will simply shield the Brexiteers from the reality of their project for a bit longer.

It would be an astonishing act of industrial vandalism for Sunderland to be sacrificed to ram home the point that Johnson has always been wearing the emperor’s new clothes, and in this era of post-truth, post-shame politics, it still mightn’t do the trick.

But, hey, maybe the German car makers that export here will suddenly storm the Bundestag and demand that Angela Merkel sorts it out in Britain’s favour to save us at the death.

Funny, but that’s a line we haven’t heard a while. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the tale getting another airing before we’re done, though. Would you?