The Brexit vacuum

If knighthoods could be removed by vote of parliament, Sir James Dyson would be first in line. Knighted for being one of Britain’s most celebrated entrepreneurs, he backed Brexit — only to decide this week to scarper to lower-taxed Singapore. To Sam Gyimah, a former Tory minister, it is a ‘betrayal of the public’. To Labour’s shadow business secretary, Rebecca Long-Bailey, it exposes a ‘culture of short-termism’ in British business. To the Lib Dem Layla Moran, it is an act of ‘staggering hypocrisy’.

This response encapsulates a failure to understand the economically liberal case for Brexit. The truth is that Brexit, in and of itself, will do very little for Britain. It brings new powers. If they are used well, we can walk taller; used badly, we can fall further. Brexit will not make global competition any easier.

Let us set aside the question of whether Dyson is a villain. His decision to designate his Singapore office as the global HQ offers useful insights into business, power and the need for realism. Dyson’s ‘move’ means just two senior staff moving to Singapore, while investment in the Wiltshire plant will not be stopped. Dyson’s decision will allow the company to avail itself of lower corporation tax (17 per cent to Britain’s 19 per cent) and better access to Chinese markets. Multinational companies are obliged, by shareholders, to conduct a regular review of whether to move their headquarters and they weigh up various factors when doing so. Forbes magazine recently conducted a worldwide survey on the best place in which to do business in terms of property rights, innovation, taxes, technology, corruption, freedom. All told, it found, nowhere was better for business than the United Kingdom.

And why? We can thank, in no small part, the ministers within the coalition government who brought in reforms to help Britain cope in the ‘global race’: it prioritised regulatory restraint, lower corporation taxes, more students in world-class universities and a pro-business environment in general.