Lest we forget, Brexit, in the long term, will not only be the greatest emancipation of Britain’s talent, enterprise and innovation but, actually, in the short term, will paradoxically provide the greatest excuse for failure for both governments, industry and commerce alike. If it hadn’t existed they would need to invent it!
You can just see it now; had Mr. Osborne still been Chancellor he would have blamed his failing Budget Deficit programme and the slowing of the UK economy onto Brexit rather than his own misplaced policies. The spate of company results, just announced, all have Brexit as the main excuse for failure to meet shareholders expectations of profits and yet it could not possibly have influenced the figures in a matter of weeks, given that it is only the last six months of trading that is relevant.
Instead, what intelligent observers should talk about is the effects of the four month hiatus to the Referendum date in June where Mr. Osborne, the architect of this fiasco, ‘spewed out’ horror stories on an hourly basis and ‘press-ganged’ his ‘cronies’, to do the same.
Is it any wonder that the UK populace was terrified to make any momentous decisions and were like ‘rabbits frozen in the headlights’? He may have ignominiously been sacked by the new Prime Minister but we still have to suffer the legacies of his reign.
We can already see the ‘green shoots’ of recovery as illustrated by the Japanese spending £24billion on Britain’s biggest tech company, ARM and the largest pharmaceutical companies in the UK, pledging to remain here for the foreseeable future.
Where is all the talk about the mass exodus of companies moving to Europe to seek their fortunes? Or is this another fairy tale of the Referendum debacle?
The two ‘M&M’s’ – May and Merkel – are, within weeks, talking about some sort of limited immigration deal in exchange for free access to the European trade markets. What happened to the talk of a long protracted negotiation on trade that would take seven years or more to complete? Even Mr. Juncker, has now changed his tune and is talking about the fact that the UK should take its time to issue Article 50.
You can just imagine the reaction of the German carmakers and the French wine producers when they are told that their second largest consumer in the world i.e. the UK will be required to impose tariffs on their products which will render them uncompetitive in the world markets – ‘it just ain’t gonna happen’.
The Stock Market is as high as it has been this year and the Pound is stable against the Dollar and Euro, albeit at a lower level, which makes it easier to export and a great allure for foreign investors to buy assets in the UK. Goodness knows we need these foreign earnings to offset our current account deficit.
Yes, it may put up inflation a little bit, but with zero inflation last year, we can afford this and, anyway, a small amount of inflation in these times, is far better than deflation, or worse still, stagflation.
So, what is all the fuss about post Brexit? We have earned new respect from our European counterparts who didn’t believe that the UK populace would have the temerity to vote ‘Out’. The Europeans are already conceding that they didn’t give Cameron very much to sell to the UK public and are, therefore, partly responsible for the outcome. Frankly, they are probably going to face more problems within the EU trying to keep it from ‘falling apart’, than we are outside of it, able to ‘fly free’.
It didn’t take long for Australia, India and China, and even the USA, to express interest in trading with us, which makes all the ‘hollow threats’, not five weeks ago, by Obama for instance who told us that we would be at the back of the queue, seem more vacuous than ever before.
Sadly, Cameron was ‘led by the nose’ by Osborne in the Referendum matter and, as such, both faced premature ends to what would have been their illustrious political careers.
Not two months ago Osborne was ‘licking his lips’ in anticipation of moving from 11 to 10 Downing Street and now has to suffer the ignominy of being an ‘also ran’ on the backbenches and taking time off to be with his family, write his memoirs (thin reading), book his public speaking events and reflect where he went wrong.
Brexit is to industry now, as plastic filler is to a bad builder – it covers all the cracks, but they soon come apart over time.