Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Thursday urged British lawmakers to back British Prime Minister Theresa May’s Brexit deal, saying “the whole world” wants Britain to avoid leaving the EU without a deal to ensure that trade continues smoothly.
Abe’s words on a visit to London were a boost to May, who is struggling to win support for her deal in parliament.
Lawmakers are due to vote on the agreement on Tuesday, and all signs suggest they will reject it, adding uncertainty to Brexit less than three months before Britain is due to leave the EU on March 29.
Photo: AFP
“We truly hope that a no-deal Brexit will be avoided. In fact, that is the wish of the whole world,” Abe said.
Warning of the economic impact from a no-deal Brexit, Abe said that Japan considers Britain “the gateway to the European market” and Japanese firms employ more than 150,000 people in the UK.
“Even post-Brexit Japan intends to maintain this very good relationship,” he added. “We truly hope that more investment will be done by Japanese businesses in the United Kingdom.”
Major employers include automakers Nissan and Honda, who rely on “just-in-time” delivery of parts from across Europe to factories in the UK.
Honda said it plans to stop production at its factory in the western English city of Swindon for six days in April to deal with potential border delays.
UK lawmakers on Thursday held the second of five days of debate on the deal, as former heads of Britain’s foreign intelligence service and the armed forces said that the agreement would threaten national security.
Former MI6 chief Richard Dearlove and former British chief of the defense staff Charles Guthrie wrote to local Conservative Party associations saying that the agreement would “place control of aspects of our national security in foreign hands.”
The deal “cuts across the three fundamentals of our national security policy”: membership in NATO, relations with the US and membership in the “Five Eyes” intelligence alliance with the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, they said.
Both men are Brexiteers who say Britain should leave without a deal and fall back onto WTO rules for trading with the EU.
Meanwhile, two of the biggest donors to the Brexit campaign said they now believe the project they championed would be abandoned and that the UK will stay in the EU.
Peter Hargreaves, the billionaire who was the second-biggest donor to the 2016 leave campaign, and veteran hedge fund manager Crispin Odey told Reuters that they expect Britain to stay in the EU.
As a result, Odey, who runs his hedge fund Odey Asset Management, said he is positioning for the pound to strengthen after his flagship fund previously reaped the benefit of betting against UK assets amid market fears.
The government is likely to first ask for an extension to the formal exit process and then call for a second referendum, Hargreaves said.
“I have totally given up. I am totally in despair, I don’t think Brexit will happen at all,” he said.
“They [pro-Europeans] are banking on the fact that people are so fed up with it that will just say: ‘Sod it, we will stay,’” he said.
Odey said that while he did not believe a second referendum would take place, he did not think Brexit would happen either.
Additional reporting by Reuters
A US YouTuber who caused outrage for filming himself kissing a statue commemorating Korean wartime sex slaves has been sentenced to six months in prison, a court in Seoul said yesterday. Johnny Somali, 25, gained notoriety several years ago for recording himself doing a series of provocative stunts in South Korea and Japan, and streaming them on platforms such as YouTube and Twitch. South Korean authorities indicted Somali — whose real name is Ramsey Khalid Ismael — in 2024 on public order violations and obstruction of business, and banned him from leaving the country. “The court has sentenced him to six months in
Former Lima mayor Rafael Lopez Aliaga, a Peruvian presidential hopeful, gathered hundreds of supporters in Lima on Tuesday and gave authorities 24 hours to annul the first round of the country’s election over allegations of fraud. Lopez Aliaga is locked in a tight three-way race with two other candidates for second place in Sunday’s vote. The election runner-up wins a ticket to June’s presidential run-off against front-runner Keiko Fujimori. “I am giving them 24 hours to declare this electoral fraud null and void,” said Lopez Aliaga, surrounded by a crowd of several hundred supporters. “If it is not declared null and void tomorrow,
PAPAL RETORT: Pope Leo told reporters that he has ‘no fear, neither of the Trump administration nor speaking out loudly about the message of the Gospel’ US President Donald Trump has feuded with Pope Leo XIV over the Iran conflict — setting off an unholy row that could have serious political implications for the Republican leader back in the US. Trump has drawn barbs even from some allies over the attacks on the US-born pontiff, who has criticized the Trump administration over its immigration crackdown, the intervention in Venezuela and the Iran war. The president risks alienating the religious right in November’s crucial US midterm elections. So far the unprecedented clash between the leader of the most powerful military on Earth and the head of the world’s 1.4 billion
A 16-year-old boy has been charged with murder and aggravated sexual abuse in Florida in the death of his 18-year-old stepsister on a Carnival Cruise ship, the US Department of Justice said on Monday. Timothy Hudson was initially charged in February and subsequently indicted on March 10, but the breadth of the case was not known until a seal was lifted on Friday last week, weeks after US District Judge Beth Bloom in Miami said that he would be prosecuted as an adult at the request of the government. Anna Kepner had been traveling on the Carnival Horizon ship in November last
RSS