Brexit may take time, but it must not take forever
Even with all the chicken chatter, the unmistakable message coming out of last week was that Britain is open for business and the world knows it. The US tech giant Amazon announced 450 new jobs for its UK office. Lee Kum Kee, the Hong Kong conglomerate, purchased the fully-let London skyscraper WalkieTalkie for £1.3billion, despite its appearance.
We aren’t just attracting foreign investment from the world outside the EU: we even managed a “vote of confidence” from Germany’s BMW as it picked Oxford over other European sites in which to build the new electric version of the iconic Mini. This fits what I’m hearing from colleagues and friends in the City: the UK’s economy will be fine. The Brexit vote certainly was a shock to the market’s system but the market is resilient.
Ian Stewart, Deloitte’s chief economist, noted in his blog last week that while there are exceptions, “much of the time external events do not radically alter the path of growth”. He goes on to argue that even huge events, the ones that dominate headlines and garner all the attention, can have little lasting impact – whereas the “dry economic stuff ” that takes place beneath the radar is what really matters. Is our economic structure the one we need? Is the macroeconomic picture bright enough? Are the right policies being pursued for growth?
Indeed, if we could continue to blow the trumpet of free trade – and, thankfully, Boris Johnson and Liam Fox appear to be doing just that across the world – we could be safely on our way to achieving the objectives of the Brexit referendum, namely self-determination, while avoiding the economic armageddon of which we were so persistently warned by the powers that be.
It is therefore with some trepidation that I am following the development of the extended transition period.
Its announcement wasn’t a complete surprise. In her Lancaster House speech in January, the Prime Minister made reference to such a period as a means of avoiding “a cliff-edge for business or a threat to stability” as we disentangle ourselves from decades of EU regulations. But what is worrying are the reports that even the most committed Brexiteer ministers are falling in behind the Chancellor’s vision of a “status quo” transition followed by a very lengthy implementation.
Extracting ourselves from the complex EU machine will take some time and I can accept that, if it means the end goal is certain – a clean Brexit with the freedom to negotiate our own trade agreements with the rest of the world.
What we absolutely cannot afford to have is for this deadline to slip, leaving us in a half-in/half-out arrangement with the EU by the time of the next general election in 2022. That would do the opposite of providing the much-needed political and economic stability for the UK to attract investment and for businesses to flourish.
As Theresa May said in her Lancaster House speech, it is in nobody’s interest to be “stuck forever in some kind of permanent political purgatory” in the form of an unlimited transition. Three years isn’t unlimited. But in a volatile political climate like ours, it can certainly turn into purgatory. FOLLOW Dia Chakravarty on Twitter @DiaChakravarty;
at telegraph.co.uk/opinion
The White House is run by crazy people. That’s official. President Trump’s new director of communications has stated in the most memorably unambiguous terms, that the man who was until a day ago, the administration’s chief of staff, Reince Priebus, is a “paranoid schizophrenic”. Or, to quote him more precisely, a “f------ paranoid schizophrenic”. The rest of what Mr Scaramucci said in that same interview about another influential White House adviser, Steve Bannon, is too scatological to put in print. If this were not terrifying, it would be funny.
The headline stories may vary from day to evermore startling day: Scaramucci’s obscenities and threats, Trump’s own highly personal attempts to bully Jeff Sessions, his attorney general, into resigning, and the failure to pass any piece of legislation that would fulfil the electoral promise to repeal and replace ObamaCare. But there is a common factor underlying them all that is testing the limits of America’s political system – which was, you may recall, a product of the Age of Reason. What the bizarre behaviour of Trump and his acolytes suggests is that those now governing