James Dyson slammed after claiming Brexit gives Brits ‘independence of spirit’

James Dyson has been routinely slammed for his latest defence of Brexit.

Speaking to BBC Breakfast this morning, the vacuum cleaner mogul and Brexiteer praised the policy for apparently helping his business thrive and for enabling Britain to develop a coronavirus vaccine.

He said: “We’ve got our freedom, we can make trade agreements with other countries outside Europe that Europe can’t make trade agreements with.

“We can employ people from all around the world. Previously we were only allowed to employ people from Europe and we couldn’t get the engineers we needed.

“Much more than that it gives us an independence of spirit and that couldn’t be better demonstrated than in the development of the vaccine. We weren’t part of the European development of the vaccine, we had to develop our own. They did it brilliantly at Oxford and AstraZeneca, a British company, took that up and produced it and it’s a world beating vaccine produced in record time and that’s because we did it independently.”

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But some took umbrage with Dyson’s words and pointed out that much of what he said was disputable at best.

Journalist Otto English said:

After all, the Oxford vaccine is but one a plethora of vaccines hailing from different parts of the world.

It might be worth him remembering that the first vaccine to be administered in Britain was the Pfizer vaccine - made in Germany.

The Oxford vaccine, for its part, was made by a team of 383 individuals including 68 people from EU member states and 32 from other countries around the world.

Others questioned his integrity, given that he moved his business from Wiltshire to Singapore following the EU in 2019:

Another remembered that Dyson reaped more than £5m in EU farming subsidies for his landholdings from 2016 to 2019, which was widely reported at the time.

And a parody account of Boris Johnson put it best:

It’s lucky Dyson is who he is; he’ll need a vacuum to clean up the mess he’s got himself in.