Big business knows.
Frankly I think investment summits are a waste of time. If top executives can’t work out where best to invest their billions without a summit and a performance by Elton John and a nice dinner then what are they being paid for?
Also most bosses would probably have gone just to be seen to be doing the right thing, and the huge investments announced would have happened anyway. But then sometimes it is not the bosses who are the ones learning things.
As David Ricks the CEO of the massive pharmaceutical Eli Lilly told the BBC yesterday "The difference in the UK, on your own now, separate from Europe, it's a relatively small market." OUCH.
The fact is the UK now, post-Brexit, has to try to attract these firms with something other than access to the whole of Europe, because they don’t, won’t and can’t have that.
We can try to have looser regulations, but then they won’t be able to sell into the rest of Europe at all if we do, we can offer them more money but then everyone offers top companies money and we can hardly promise them low wages and higher profits.
The companies we want to attract are huge, cutting edge, science based giants, who need lots of highly educated, very skilled, well paid workers. They are not coming to the UK to build sweatshops.
We do have lots of attractions, culture, sport, history, language, and universities, amongst others. But we also used to have seamless access to a market of hundreds of millions of wealthy Europeans.
Now we are just “a relatively small market.” It makes more sense to base yourself in France or Germany, Spain or even Northern Ireland and have access to a huge market and export a small amount of your production to Great Britain.
You can have Elton John perform as often as you want, it won’t change those facts. We have declared a trade war against ourselves and big business knows it.
Economics, trade and Brexit, not necessarily in that order but the dog always comes first.
By Jonty Bloom Media
14 years of hollowing out the state, 14 years of under investment in every aspect of our infrastructure, plus brexit. We’ve run out of feet to shoot ourselves in.
It was always bloody obvious that, with Brexshit itself being so ill-defined, letting the nutters and ultras have their way and extract us from the single market was a recipe for disaster - except for some 'sovereign individuals'. It's also bloody obvious that the quickest route to fixing some of our country's economic problems is to rejoin that market as an urgent priority.