On R4 Today yesterday there was an item on Virgin's launch of an Entrepreneur Prize. They had Branson talking about it / indulging in more self-promotion. Then they asked him about UK and Europe. He replied with something on the lines of:-
"Well, I won't be popular for saying this, but I think it would be a very bad for business for the UK to leave the EU. Because 50 years ago when I started in business and was trying to sell records to Europe [he probably meant France] the added a 38% import duty on the records made it impossible for me to export".
Leaving aside that I read somewhere 'allegedly' that RB was involved in a tax fraud, which involved pretending to export record albums, he has as you would expect got the economics exactly the wrong way round.
His business did not 'lose sales' by being unable to export to Europe low priced records. It was the citizens of Europe that lost out by being denied the opportunity by their governments from saving by buying at low prices.
Europe has about 350m people. The global population is about 8Bn. That leaves about 7.65Bn that Branson could still sell to.
The main lesson from this is that Branson might want private enterprise but he sure does not want free enterprise.
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