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UKโ€™s ยฃ35bn fashion industry warns of โ€œdecimationโ€ from #brexit - big names sign open letter to @BorisJohnson urging action. Many of 50,000 SMEs on the rack due to VAT, customs and work permit issues. Stay with me/1

@BorisJohnson You can read the full text of the letter here, co-ordinated by Fashion Round Table @FashionRoundTab, but tl;dr it says that #Brexit has left a "gaping hole" in an industry that relies of free movement of professionals. It's a familiar cry /2

https://t.co/gGurZTIcho
@BorisJohnson @FashionRoundTab The industry, already whacked by #COVID19, is now discovering that cross-border sales are a horror (VAT, Customs, long delays) and models, stylists, photographers that used to blat around Europe can't any more. They need permits, for themselves, for their gear /3
It is on one level amazing that this is only just fully dawning - as the musician industry found out recently - but fashion is not just big names and big companies. It's actually a mountain of small companies and sole traders often that feed into a huge (ยฃ35bn) industry /4
I've written about fashion models issue before (they need tier-5 sponsorship visas) and how that will erode London's status as a hub, but this goes so much wider than this - hence the #dontmakefashionhistory campaign - and comes down the lack of a mobility chapter in the deal /5
This campaign has some big names...400 have signed, including @twiggy @YLBofficialsite Yasmin Le Bon, Nick Knight, @RoksandaIlincic @laurabailey_uk and serious industry players, who now see how badly an industry like fashion gets squeezed by #brexit /6
@Twiggy @YLBofficialsite @RoksandaIlincic @laurabailey_uk These luminaries want some kind of 'fix'...as Helen Brocklebank, CEO of @Walpole_UK says 42% per cent of UK luxury export sales are from the EU. The #Brexit costs and admin mean many of her members "have concluded they simply canโ€™t afford to continue selling to those countries"/7
@Twiggy @YLBofficialsite @RoksandaIlincic @laurabailey_uk @Walpole_UK Isabel Ettedgui, the chief executive of Savile Row brand Connolly, which sells Scottish cashmere and manufactures leather goods in Spain says its an existential challenge for "a 185-year-old company that holds the Royal Warrant" /8
@Twiggy @YLBofficialsite @RoksandaIlincic @laurabailey_uk @Walpole_UK Katharine Hamnett, the fashion designer best known for political T-shirts and championing ethical business practices, says "brands will die" without a radical overhaul of customs & VAT arrangements /9
@Twiggy @YLBofficialsite @RoksandaIlincic @laurabailey_uk @Walpole_UK These are big names, but they are the front of house for a huge number of small traders - the button makers, the jewellery makers, the leather workers, stylists etc that fitted into an industry that has grown up on free movement - which is now at an end /10
@Twiggy @YLBofficialsite @RoksandaIlincic @laurabailey_uk @Walpole_UK And as Barnier aid @StefaanDeRynck observed after the musicians made similar pleas...well, that's what happens when you don't have a 'mobility chapter ' in the deal' - welcome to a new world of #brexit /11

https://t.co/4FftDitAKr
@Twiggy @YLBofficialsite @RoksandaIlincic @laurabailey_uk @Walpole_UK @StefaanDeRynck So where is the British government in all this? Well, pretty impotent really - it just issues statements saying it is working with industry, it wants to "seize new opportunities" and, oh, it has helplines that it spent money on...but then what else can it say? /12
Fashion is a big UK success story - 1.6% of UK GDP, growing 11% a year - and trading with New York or Tokyo or China really isn't going to help a lot of those SMEs offset the losses that come with a deal that makes it a pain to buy British, sell to the EU, hire a UK model /13
There are some things in the UK's gift that @FashionRoundTab is asking for - like putting garment workers on the occupation shortage list, but on the really big stuff - customs, VAT, free movement - well, that's what we asked for. We wanted to be Canada...now we are /14
@FashionRoundTab There is still hope in some industries that as #COVID19 lifts, as the UK erects the same customs borders as the EU in July (and EU traders and professionals feels the same pinch) that 'common sense will prevail and that easements and fixes will emerge..../15
@FashionRoundTab But given the politics at the moment - UK refusing EU ambo full recognition, the spats over #COVID19 vaccines, the clusterf*** over the Irish protocol last weekend, the appointment of Lord Frost "Captain Sovereignty" as chief #Brexit guy, I'm not sure I'd bet on it /16
@FashionRoundTab The fashion industry is of course right to campaign hard as it can, for whatever it can get, but as @SamuelMarcLowe has observed, there are hard limits - whether on professional services, or hubbing goods into the EU from the UK - on what can be achieved /17
@FashionRoundTab @SamuelMarcLowe The #COVID19 pandemic gives the govt some breathing space...but sooner or later, you'd think the government will have to start to explain what the point of all this is? Other than alluding to the mythical 'sea of opportunity'...which may start to grate when folks are drowning END

More from Peter Foster

Another head-banging day for the ยฃ112bn UK creative sector that is starting to ingest how difficult #Brexit is going to make their lives - and how little the government is really willing to do to fix the lack of a 'mobility' chapter in the EU-UK trade deal. Quick update.../1

First Equity @EquityUK put out a letter to @BorisJohnson warning that #brexit was a "towering hurdle" (you'd want Brian Blessed reading that part) to UK actors plying their trade in EU - a double whammy with #COVID19 /2

https://t.co/mXjTAISqZk


@BorisJohnson One third of Equity members say they've seen job ads asking for EU passport holders: "Before, we were able to travel to Europe visa-free. Now we have to pay hundreds of pounds, fill in form after form, and spend weeks waiting for approval" /3

@BorisJohnson Worth recalling that all this goes back to the UK desire NOT to have a 'mobility' provision within the TCA - all part of 'ending Free Movement' and the professional services folk - including musicians, actors, fashion models etc -are all victim of

@BorisJohnson What's the government going to do about all this? Good question, which brings us to todays @CommonsDCMS hearing in which the Culture Minister Caroline Dinenage @cj_dinenage frankly pin-balled around the issues /5

More from Economy

1/ To add a little texture to @NickHanauer's thread, it's important to recognize that there's a good reason why orthodox economists (& economic cosplayers) so vehemently oppose a $15 min wage:

The min wage is a wedge that threatens to undermine all of orthodox economic theory.


2/ Orthodox economics is grounded in two fundamental models: a systems model that describes the market as a closed equilibrium system, and a behavioral model that describes humans as rational, self-interested utility-maximizers. The modern min wage debate undermines both models.

3/ The assertion that a min wage kills jobs is so central to orthodox economics that it is often used as the textbook example of the Supply/Demand curve. Raise the cost of labor and businesses will buy less of it. It's literally Econ 101!


4/ Econ 101 insists that markets automatically set an efficient "equilibrium price" for labor & everything else. Mess with this price and bad things happen. Yet decades of empirical research has persuaded a majority of economists that this just isn't

5/ How can this be? Well, either the market is not a closed equilibrium system in which if you raise the price of labor employers automatically purchase less of it... OR the market is not automatically setting an efficient and fair equilibrium wage. Or maybe both. #FAIL

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