Question Time: Businesswoman directs angry tirade at Jacob Rees-Mogg telling him ‘It won’t be you that suffers’ from Brexit She said she was having to move some of her business to the EU ‘because of people like the ERG and their hard line Brexiteer stance’

Brexiteer Jacob Rees-Mogg faced severe criticism during Question Time on Thursday night from one business owner in the audience, who told the MP his stance on Brexit was damaging her company and the wider economy.

Mr Rees-Mogg, who chairs the hardline European Research Group (ERG) of Eurosceptic Tories, was told by the unnamed woman about the damage Brexit is already doing to her chemicals business during the show’s broadcast in Aylesbury.



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She told the MP: “I run a chemical company in Aylesbury. Over the past thirty years, we’ve grown from nothing to a medium size company, employing people here buying products from all over the world, bringing them into the UK and selling them in the UK and in Europe.

“Because of the trade barriers that are being put up by Brexit and the duplicated regulations, the massively increased costs and bureaucracy of Brexit, we are now having to bypass the UK for half of our business.”

Hardline Brexiteers

She then turned her fire on Mr Rees-Mogg’s ERG group that has frequently prevented Theresa May softening her Brexit demands.

The woman added: “I don’t want to do this, I want to employ people in the UK. I want to pay UK taxes and I want to support UK services, but because of people like the ERG and their hardline Brexiteer stance, I’m having to do this.



“We are not alone, there are thousands of other companies in the UK doing this too.

“We are all going to lose, employment, taxes, our overstretched and underfunded public services are going to suffer. When that happens, it’s not going to be the Rees-Mogg’s and the Johnson’s that are going to suffer from that. It’s going to be us. The working people of the UK.

“Any Brexit deal is going to be worse than what we’ve already got, the worst-case scenario is a no-deal Brexit.

“The Brexiteers don’t seem to care, or they don’t know actually what they’re trying to do,” she said. As her point drew to a close she received a loud round of applause from the audience.

‘Low economic growth’

Mr Rees-Mogg began to respond, saying that with Brexit the UK is freeing itself from barriers that he claimed had “led to low economic growth”. As some in the audience applauded his point the woman repeatedly shouted “That is not true”.

He branded the EU a “failed economic project”, and said: “We are going to be freeing ourselves so we can be economically more successful.”



He went on: “We can lower the prices of goods in this country by cutting tariffs. We can have cheaper food, clothing and footwear benefitting most of all the least well off in our society.

“This is a terrific benefit. So do I think industry will benefit in the end? Overwhelmingly, it will be good for competitiveness and good for British business.”

With Brexit looming on the 29th of March firms are having to activate no deal preparations. Many have opened offices in other European countries so they can continue to trade inside the single market, should Britain leave with a deal to maintain tariff-free access after Brexit.