COMMENT
COMMENT
Ever feel they’re out to get you?
Fiona Russell-Horne Editor-in-Chief - BMJ
“
As flies to wanton boys, are we to the Gods. They play with us for their spport
William Shakespeare ” INFO PANEL
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pring 2020 was supposed to be the start of something. Something good, or at least better than we have had over the past year or two. We had the election which saw Boris Johnson winning a thumping great majority and gave him and his ‘Get Brexit Done’ brigade the go-ahead to withdraw from the EU. Johnson managed to do exactly what Teresa May had hoped – but singularly failed - to do when she launched her snap general election and basically squandered the overall majority inherited from David Cameron. Maybe her timing was wrong, maybe her message was wrong, maybe people just didn’t like her. Anyway, we started 2020 with the EU Withdrawal agreement signed and a sense that this time, we really did need to get the right agreements in place and get on with it. For the three years and half years since the June 2016 referendum, the UK economy has been deal- ing with the consequences. Dealing with the court cases and the Parliamentary votes – all of them -, two general elections, the protests, the People’s Vote Marches, Milkshake-gate and the endless, endless appearances of Nigel Farage on our TV screens. Projects got put on hold, consumer confi- dence waned, High Street spending took a massive hit and housing transactions slowed up. However, with the end of the year there was also this massive feeling of relief, a sense that at least now something would happen, one way or another. It’s the uncertainty that is the killer of business confidence and the ability to plan, to invest and to grow the business.
S
So, just for a brief interlude it looked like we might have escaped the worst of the post-Brexit
fall-out. It seemed as though Project Fear didn’t look like being nearly as bad as some of the more gloomy amongst us (yes, me included) feared. Just as it looked as though the uncertainty and eco- nomic turbulence of the long drawn out Brexit/EU Withdrawal process might be drawing to a close, someone has put a spoke in that particular wheel. Thanks to the fears over Covid-19, the respira- tory disease caused by the coronavirus, the FTSE, Dow Jones and pretty much all of the world stock markets last month took their biggest tumble since the October 2008 crash. We all know how long it took us to recover from that one.
Already the Italian lightside exhibition Mostra- Convegno has been postponed and if you were planning a quick city-break to Northern Italy by Easyjet, well, let’s just say good luck with that. As with Brexit, it’s the not knowing and the ‘just- in-case’ preparations that are proving the worst part. There aren’t many businesses relishing the thought of having to put one-fifth of their employ- ees on self-isolation for a fortnight on the back of their cheeky little skiing trip to the Dolomites. Initially, the numbers outside of China, South Korea and that little pocket in Northern Italy were low, relatively speaking, but it’s in the nature of infections to grow exponentially. Not knowing how vulnerable anyone is or who might catch it, how they might get it or for how long is really messing with the economy in a way that we thought we’d managed to dodge.
Typical. We go through all the Brexit uncertainty just to have market jitters over the possibility of a pandemic screw things up for us? Thanks a lot, world.
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