News that British firms will be excluded from €10bn of space sector contracts even before it leaves the EU, the Liberal Democrats have said the blame lies squarely with Theresa May.

Liberal Democrat Foreign Affairs spokesperson Tom Brake MP said:

“A day after the Chancellor made a pitch to high tech entrepreneurs to stay in Britain, it emerges that we are being frozen out of the €10bn Galileo project because the British government can’t even be bothered to say it wants to be part of it.

“The space sector has sent a very clear message to Theresa May – it says that the government’s abject failure to say that it even wants to stay in vital EU space programmes is directly responsible for Britain being cut out of the action.

“The usual suspects will say this is all the doing of those ‘nasty Europeans’, but this is a direct consequence of the government’s blind pursuit of a hard Brexit. You can’t have a hard Brexit and a thriving high tech sector. The price for this scandalous failure will be paid for by British workers in the form of high skilled British jobs.”

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