COMMENT: Honda’s electric shock for Swindon—it’s business, not politics

The British car industry owes much to Japanese automakers, which last year accounted for just shy of half of the UK’s 1.52-million-unit car output.

And the Japanese automakers have good reason to be grateful to the UK, too; Nissan began producing cars in Sunderland in the mid-1980s, and Honda started car production at Swindon in 1992, in the same year the first Toyotas came out of Derbyshire. The attraction? Tariff-free access to Europe from a country that was easy to do business with, and which welcomed foreign investment.