Brexit and business: Is the government listening?
Other big employers could follow Airbus, which issued a dire warning to the government about Brexit - but what can the PM do?
Saturday 23 June 2018 15:51, UK
The dateline at the top of Airbus' warning to the UK government about the perils of a no deal Brexit is telling: Toulouse.
The southern French city is not just the global HQ of one of Britain's biggest employers, but home to a key part of the Galileo GPS system - that's the glittering EU project that only last month the EU warned we might be frozen out of.
The Toulouse headquartering of Airbus underlines their position as Remain Central; just like the car industry Airbus needs border-less trading with continental Europe for its "just in time" manufacturing processes to work. "Almost in time" is just too late.
Airbus has waited a long time to make public its ominous noises about the firm's future in a post-Brexit, no customs deal Britain, and in the meantime it has put figures on the cost of a hard border: €1bn to be spent on a stockpile of what it is calling buffer stock to smooth out delays and maybe the same amount knocked off its weekly turnover.
No deal must be avoided, as its Brexit position paper-come-"risk assessment" says in as many words.
None of this will be any surprise to Number 10, which has been talking to businesses at length, even while those businesses have been complaining they're not being being listened too.
A survey in February showed 94% of more than 600 smaller firms thought their concerns were falling on deaf ears, while Airbus' Broughton union convener, representing 6,500 North Wales workers, said he has been to Downing Street twice and thinks no one is listening.
The government though, is caught between a rock and a hard place.
It knows Airbus is serious, it knows the number one concern of importing and exporting firms of all sizes is uncertainty, but it has to deliver Brexit and it has to negotiate the best deal it can with an EU council protecting its own interests.
Airbus may have waited until now to issue its warning of severe disruption because it didn't want to be seen as part of Project Fear.
Perhaps other big employers will come out now with similar warnings.
The government will hear them and it insists it is listening. What it can do is another matter entirely.