(Bloomberg) -- Tim Martin, boss of cheap-and-cheerful pub chain JD Wetherspoon Plc and an outspoken supporter of the U.K.'s departure from the European Union, has turned his attention from getting any Brexit to getting the right Brexit.
Lovers of Wetherspoon's inexpensive beer and budget thousand-calorie English breakfasts will be greeted by a “hard-hitting message on Brexit” when they look down at coasters awaiting them in the chain's 895 U.K. pubs, the company said Wednesday.
The message, printed on 500,000 mats, calls on the leaders of the U.K.'s three main political parties to “stop messing about” and endorse the company's “three-point manifesto.” In the weeks leading up to the EU referendum last year, the chain distributed 200,000 beer mats making the case for Brexit.
The new coasters urge the government to take steps that would help Wetherspoon, including the following:
- Unilaterally grant citizenship rights to legal EU immigrants (Wetherspoon reportedly employs 3,500 foreign workers)
- Eliminate taxes on food imported from outside the EU, while ensuring that food imports from the EU into the U.K. also continue to be tax-free from 2019 (Wetherspoon says it will save an average of 3.5 pence per meal and 0.5 pence per drink if the U.K. leaves the EU and abolishes the taxes)
- Stop paying 200 million pounds ($266 million) per week into “EU coffers” (Martin previously backed the now infamous 350 million pounds-a-week figure that was paraded on the side of a Leave campaign bus)
The U.K. government will be able to lower food prices “at a stroke” after exiting the EU, Martin said Wednesday, while taking a swipe at J Sainsbury Plc Chairman David Tyler, calling his estimates of higher food prices in the event of an EU exit without a deal “highly misleading.”
“It's important to provide the public with the truth, so that they are able to decide for themselves,” Martin said.
On a 4-pound breakfast, 3.5 pence equates to just 0.9 percent. That might not go far in clawing back the higher import costs the pub and restaurant industry face with the pound down about 13 percent against the euro since the Brexit vote. The company is ready to ditch EU suppliers if necessary, it said in September.
But with Wetherspoon also facing a tax increase of about 20 million pounds next year, following what Martin described as the U.K.'s “budget for dinner parties,” he might be keeping an even closer eye on margins.
To contact the reporter on this story: Joe Easton in London at jeaston7@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Adveith Nair at anair29@bloomberg.net, Eric Pfanner, Paul Jarvis
©2017 Bloomberg L.P.
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