Maybe I should be, but I’m still not punch drunk by Brexit. As someone who cares passionately about the northern region and the businesses in it, what, if anything, should our businesses be doing in the face of these continuing, mind-boggling political and economic uncertainties?
It seems to me that right now, politics has been turned on its head. The electorate’s views seem to be defined almost exclusively by our attitude towards Brexit. It never used to be like this. A large number of northern Labour heartlands and Tory shires are fervently Leave constituencies, whilst their more metropolitan Labour and Conservative cousins, mainly in the south, voted Remain. This has made for a lot of very strange political bedfellows.
I have long thought that the political party which blinked first over Brexit, would be the loser at the next general election, because they will have immediately been seen to have betrayed half their voters. The other party, recognising the fall-out, will pull their socks up, thinking ‘this could have been us.’
Well, on Monday, 25th February, the Labour Party blinked, by edging towards support for a second referendum. Labour is now in grave danger of losing many more votes from its own Leave supporters, than it can ever possibly gain from Remain Tories. And the reason might be summed up in two words: ‘Jeremy Corbyn.’
In all honesty, I can’t really imagine many Conservative Remainers being seduced by a Stalinist, a supporter of terrorists, a misogynist and an anti-Semite, just because he is prepared to give them a second chance at the ballot box over Europe.
If I am right, it means the Tories could now be much better placed to win the next general election, even if Brexit ends up in a total shambles, which is still a real possibility.
In fact, the more I think about it, the more I believe that the outcome of the next general election will be less about Brexit, and more about: ‘Who do you most trust to run the United Kingdom - a clumsy but determined woman who isn’t a great negotiator, or a politician who never grew out of his teenage polytechnic fantasies of creating a communist-styled fantasy nation that hasn’t even worked in theory, let alone in practice?
Because of Brexit, we are still in that territory so famously described by Donald Rumsfeld as ‘the unknown unknown’. Consequently, I don’t think business can do much right now, except sit on the side-lines and wait for the fog to clear.
Goods and services will still find a way to market – they always do. And, to use the words of another famous American politician: ‘it’s the economy , stupid!’
So, in spite of our PM’s continuing, heroic failure to secure a Brexit of anything other than the most fudged kind, it seems to me that the Leader of the Opposition has inadvertently strengthened the Tories’ chances at the next general election. By blinking. Which will be better for economic stability, even if the future is still shrouded in mist of the pea soup variety.
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