EU loyalists disparaging post-referendum Britain as “the sick man of Europe” have received a body blow as a series of major international companies announce major investments and recruitment initiatives in the country.
Amazon UK supremo Doug Gurr said he was continuing to attract “plenty of applicants” from British and global talent for roles in London, where the online giant has just opened a new fifteen-floor headquarters.
Mr Gurr announced that Amazon would be seeking to recruit some 450 to 900 tech employees in order to soup up their Prime Video service, describing London as a “brilliant location for talent because of its universities, its strength in engineering and science and its reputation in fashion. It’s a place we feel good about, and the food is good.”
The company already has already committed to creating at least 5,000 new jobs in Britain en route to establishing a permanent workforce of some 24,000 across the country.
Meanwhile, auto-giant BMW has given British manufacturing a “vote of confidence” by choosing its Oxford plant as the production hub for its new all-electric ‘Mini E’ – beating out competing sites in the corporation’s native Germany and the Netherlands.
“The business case for Oxford is the best one on offer given current economic and trading conditions,” said a company spokesman.
This comes not long after a senior member of Germany’s Free Democratic Party – kingmakers in many post-war German elections and thought to be on course to help Angela Merkel form a government following this year’s federal elections – said a “successful Brexit” – with a generous and expansive UK-EU trade deal – “is of fundamental importance to Germany,” which exports some 86 billion euros’ worth of exports to the country annually.
The CEO of food giant Quorn, Kevin Brennan, has also said his business can continue to thrive even with a hard version of Brexit,” noting that “While [the company has] significant sales in the EU, [it has] a lot of sales outside the EU” as well – with the Asia and the U.S. – where a major trade deal is currently in the works – being particularly important markets.
“Growth is coming through and we believe it’s eminently possible for us and we’re spending £150m to build the capacity necessary to achieve that,” he pledged.
Remainers, who embraced dire predictions of recession and job losses by so-called experts at the George Osborne-led Treasury, International Monetary Fund, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and other establishment institutions – all of which proved false – have taken some solace from early economic figures for 2017 which appear to show that growth – while continuing – has slowed somewhat, with the Left-liberal Guardian newspaper reporting that Britain is “fast becoming the sick man of Europe”.
The recent spate of investments – coupled with the fact that Britain’s growth figures are in fact better than those for EU mainstays such as France and Italy – will prove worrisome for commentators who have staked their reputations on a yet-to-materialise economic collapse.
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