COMMENT
COMMENT
Fiona Russell-Horne Editor-in-Chief - BMJ
he Builders Merchants Federation Conference, which starts this week in Dubrovnik, was supposed to be the first major merchant industry event post-Brexit. We were originally going to leave the European Union at the end of March 2019, two years after the UK Prime Minister triggered Article 50.
The free trade agreement that we will have to do with the European Union should be one of the easiest in human history.
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It didn’t happen. And then it didn’t happen again. And again. I’m really not sure for how much longer commentators can keep talking about the fact that it hasn’t yet happened; if it’s getting slightly tedious to write about, it must be getting awful boring to read about. That doesn’t mean that need for the conversation about how businesses need to plan for a future where the UK economy operates outside of the EU has gone away. The fact that the UK is still a member of the European Union is slightly embarrassing. Regardless of which way one voted in the referendum - and as it is starting to feel as though it all happened a lifetime ago, I am surprised any of us can remember - we are being regarded throughout Europe as something of a political basket-case.
It doesn’t help that, having been unable to persuade Parliament to back her, Teresa May is hoarding packing cases in the Downing Street dining room, while half the Tory Party it seems are lining up to have a punt at replacing her. Some of them we’ve even heard of before. Still, if you believe the rhetoric of most of them we will be ‘Out by October’, with or without a deal.
It’s the not knowing what’s happening that’s the killer. Businesses need a certain degree of, well, certainty, to be able to plan properly, whether that’s for investment or recruitment
Uncertainly so T
or diversifying or whatever. I still have as many friends who are job-hunting and getting no- where ‘because of Brexit’ now as I did in the first year post-Referendum.
Of course, that could just mean that many businesses are using it as an excuse not to make a decision. Whether that is true or not, doesn’t really matter, the point is that we have been in a kind of holding pattern for some time and it probably can’t last.
So far, things have been helped along by the fact that we still have deals, we still have the agreements that mean we don’t have stockpiles of timber and lettuce on the dockside at Tilbury because the paperwork hasn’t been completed. So far, we still have the border agreements which means lorries can whizz through Dover without having to be parked all the way along the M20. When it all changes, who knows what might or might not happen. Whoever is PM by then may have the cojones to get Barnier et al to play ball or we may end up being Billy-no-mates playing on our own for a while.
Watching some of the footage of the US Presidential State Visit just now though, it’s clear that Trump seems to think the UK economy is ripe for the picking: “I think everything with a trade deal is on the table. When you are dealing in trade everything is on the table. So the NHS or anything else and a lot more than that. Everything is on the table.”
Our NHS has its difficulties, certainly. In many places it is on its knees. However, in many, many other ways it brilliant and is the envy of the world. A US-style health-care system is a very, very different animal. The UK needs to know what kind of deals it wants with the rest of the world or the rest of the world will come and decide for us.
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www.buildersmerchantsjournal.net June 2019
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