Sunderland Echo

A Brexit of caviar or cockroach?

- By Richard Ord

One day we’ll look back on this Brexit furore and laugh, wondering what all the fuss was about.

Whether we’ll be looking back and laughing as we fight over the last cockroach for lunch from our postapocal­yptic bunker, as some doom-mongers will have us think, is yet to be ascertaine­d. The Remainers certainly paint a bleak future on leaving the EU.

Who knows, maybe we’ll all be laughing from our penthouse suites over caviar bought on the profits of living in the most productive nation in the world, a UK that went it alone and prospered from being released from the shackles of EU bureaucrac­y ... as the most positive of Leavers would have it.

In truth, the only certainty we have at the moment is uncertaint­y. We don’t know for sure what leaving the EU will mean for the UK, or our own community for that matter. And it is the uncertaint­y we feel today that is the biggest problem.

There’s nothing the business community hates more than uncertaint­y. They can’t plan, they can’t accurately predict and, as such, they are reluctant to invest. And if there is little investment, there is little growth, and it’s the ordinary folk who suffer most.

We voted to leave the EU at the referendum and, as our poll today reveals, we are still happy to leave even without a deal.

Of course, our poll is not official, but as an indicator of feeling, it’s clear that our community continues to want out of the EU and Parliament as a whole needs to deliver. And deliver they must.

It’s unlikely to be caviar or cockroache­s, but it would be nice to think one day we’ll look back and laugh, because at the moment the uncertaint­y is delivering nought but grim faces.

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