The Rise and Fall of a Vision: Wrightbus Enters Administration

> On top of this, comes the inescapable elephant that is Brexit. This may only be one of the factors affecting Wrightbus, but it is arguably the crippling final blow. Wrightbus is a Northern Ireland based supplier, dependent on parts and orders from the EU and beyond, a strong UK economy, and a stable period of national and local government. All of those pillars have been cracked by Brexit.

None of those things have changed, or been changed by Brexit in this timeframe.

> Today, it shares the complex ‘just in time’ outsourcing and parts delivery model seen in the world of car manufacture. The drastic fall of Sterling, as well as the uncertainty over future trading arrangements with the European Union, have increased both present costs and future risks for the firm. This has made it increasingly hard to win contracts outside of the UK.

- low-valued GBP increases costs of parts from abroad

- uncertain trading agreements increases risk, likely increases costs higher

- uncertainty also decreases ability to win international contracts

Brexit sits in limbo. Either it won't happen, which gets more likely as time goes by, or the government will do something extraordinarily stupid and put a border back between Ireland and Northern Ireland.

Arguably one of the big impacts of Brexit is that the government no longer has or is capable of any other policy. Perhaps they could have attempted a rescue. Or a clawback of the donations (see Sir Philip Green and the BHS pension fund). But the Westminster government is crippled by its own incompetence, and Stormont has been absent for three years. It reconvened very briefly on Monday in an attempt to stop the abortion law in Northern Ireland being brought up to date (because that's obviously the most important thing facing NI, right?), but that fizzled out.

Sadly it was an internal consultation that, unsurprisingly, wasn’t published. I think there could be good grounds for an FOI request though.

The bus is part of a system, as you said, but it's only the visible entry point and when the system is designed around handling individual fares, flat rates, children, free fares for students and the elderly, as well as making it fair and equitable (and relying very much on fares for funding), then you have a bus which must work with that system. Some cities rely on conductors or a vast fleet of ticket inspectors, but London's public transport system might be the biggest and most extensive in the world, and some things don't work well at that scale.

America seems in general to have a lot of stuff hanging over roads - like traffic lights, signs, electricity lines, phone lines - thing that the UK puts to the side of the road or buries underneath it. Maybe it's because American roads are wider so traffic lights at the side of a six lane road don't really work any more and they have to hang them up for the middle lanes to be able to see them.

>If you don't have a 4x4 Chelsea Tractor lobby, you can just use bendy buses.

I fail to see the specific connection between the SUV drivers and bendy buses, as these articulated buses were operational on only 12 routes out of 700+ due to their restrictions. If the implication is that these buses were taken out of circulation due to a vocal lobby of car owners of certain luxury marques, living in salubrious boroughs, then it is a preposterous suggestion. The real reason is that this bus was a death machine ─ snaking along the streets ─ killing cyclists, bikers, pedestrians and motorists alike. Amongst a catalogue of flaws, ranging from being prone to catching fire to acquiring the label of 'free bus' by fare dodgers; it's only saving grace in the near-decade long operation was being wheelchair-friendly.

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/bendy-buses-the-fatal-facts-...

Don’t take everything at face value: a fall in Sterling necessarily means that an exporters products are cheaper overseas, so should boost sales. Unless their costs were already higher than their revenues, in which case they were doomed anyway. The reason brexit will be bad for exporters is the possible future imposition of tariffs. This hasn’t happened yet, so actually in the short term brexit is relatively good for them. Just to be clear I’m against brexit, however in this case blaming brexit for the failure is wrong.

they didn't go thru with it. like most other banks, they were in fact waiting for handouts. some countries were actually hoodwinked into giving them.

they're currently hiring all across the world, including the UK: https://careers.bankofamerica.com/search-jobs.aspx?c=&r=emea

>At the end of the day businesses have higher costs or are leaving the UK because of Brexit.

Though I personally (and not being involved in it directly or indirectly) think Brexit is essentially a "stupid" move by the UK, I don't think that it - in itself - should cause any particularly dramatic change, after all the world worked fine even before the European Economic Community and the consequent easyness in import/export within the EU.

Surely there will be some changes in procedures and probably some added bureaucracy but nothing that cannot be taken care of.

From experience, in the '70's and '80's exporting from Italy to the UK involved having a "special" status as "registered exporter" at the Ministry and filling a number of Customs and Bank forms (only for the record and as a curiosity, some of these forms were needed in some 10 copies and at the time the "most powerful" electric typewriter we had available could make at the most 6 or 7 carbon copies, so each form was typed twice).

I have the feling that Brexit is used as a sort of scapegoat or that linking it directly to the bad results of companies (most probably due to a number of different reasons) is a way to attempt influencing the people to be against it.

> Bank of America spent $400 million to relocate from UK to Ireland. [1] for example. And they're not coming back.

I had no idea Bank of America closed its Canary Wharf London office and will "never come back" from Ireland.