Part of 1. Questions to the Cabinet Secretary for Economy and Transport – in the Senedd at 1:34 pm on 4 July 2018.
I'm sure the Cabinet Secretary will agree with me that no sensible person wants to see tariffs on imports and exports of cars between Britain and the EU. In the unhappy event that the European Commission continues to block proposals for a free trade deal, it would be the EU that would come off worst because they export £3.9 billion-worth of cars to us; we export only £1.3 billion to them, and half the cars that are exported to Britain from the EU are from Germany alone. Has he seen that Rupert Stadler, the chairman of Audi, has said that there will be no winners if a trade deal wasn't struck between the EU and the UK, and it would cost jobs in Germany as well as Britain, and that Lutz Meschke from Porsche cars says failure to strike a deal would put German jobs at risk? And, of course, as a result of the Trump tariff plans, there would be massive problems created for the European car manufacturers, and that's because the EU imposes a 10 per cent tariff on cars imported from the US, whereas the US imposes only a 2.5 per cent tariff at the moment. So, it's the EU's protectionism and their own negotiating intransigence that produces these potential problems.