A letter to the Editor of the Daily Telegraph which was published on 6th July 2000.

Your correspondents (July 3rd) are right to suspect that some foreign car industry owners are using spurious arguments about the strength of the pound as an excuse for closing UK plants or squeezing subsidies out of the UK taxpayer.  For instance, BMW’s claim that it was “losing” £750 million a year was more than double the whole wage bill at Longbridge.

In round terms, only about £3,000 of a £10,000 ex-works price of a car is accounted for by car makers themselves.  Allowing for the import content of bought-in materials and components means that only about 50-55 per cent of the ex-works cost of a UK car exported to Euroland is subject to the UK/euro exchange rate.

Since launch, the euro has declined 11 per cent against sterling, making an adverse euro price difference of about 5.5 per cent – hardly commensurate with the huge noise currently being generated.  Moreover, the Nissan Sunderland plant last year had a commendable 20 car per man-year output advantage over competitive Continental plants, which translates to an offsetting advantage of about three per cent on a £10,000 car.

Before we all get swept along by the current furore from the foreign car lobby (from which Honda is notably absent) we should remember that the biggest market for most British goods is right here in the United Kingdom where, in many cases, the decline in the euro/£ rate has meant a welcome 11 per cent reduction in input costs.

While the Government has no control over exchange rates, it could control the proposed fuel cost levy.

A letter to the Daily Telegraph, the first three paragraphs of which were published on 3rd January 1995.

One wonders what sort of distribution of industry Mr Hamish Mitchell envisages with his talk of betrayal of Scotland in the last 10 years.  The fact that England has two major steel plants and Scotland none doesn’t mean that Scotland has been “betrayed”.  Steel plants have been closed all over England, and indeed in the whole Western World; likewise naval shipyards.

Scotland has less than 9% of the UK’s population.  When the number of industrial plants of a given type is down to one or two for the whole UK, is Mr Mitchell seriously suggesting that Scotland should always have one of every type?  Every government for years has made strenuous offorts to keep existing industry going in Scotland to encourage new industries to locate there with generous subsidies not available, for example, here in the North West of England.  And the policy has indeed been successful for Scotland which now has a computer industry of a size far greater than its population would warrant unless seen as part of the United Kingdom.

Poll-tax experiment or not, the fact is also that Scotland has long received substantially more public funds per head from UK taxation than has England.  Nobody I know in England resents that, but we do resent ill-founded accusations of betrayal.

England and Scotland have travelled a long way together for nearly 300 years.  It would be the worst sort of tragedy for that union to break up asa result of the sort of ill-informed rancour evidenced by Mr Mitchell’s letter.