Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

Why business is perfectly relaxed about Brexit

It’s difficult to go into the office nowadays, since most of my colleagues are so distraught by the prospect of a no-deal Brexit that they rarely speak. The finance department have painted European flags on their faces for solace, and spend the day staring blankly out of the window sobbing over a tear-stained picture of Guy Verhofstadt.

Except, um, no. None of this has happened. In fact, most businesses seem weirdly calm in contemplation of a no-deal Brexit. I have met people from multinationals who are sanguine about Brexit, and those who are worried, but few get emotional about the subject as, say, academics, politicians or journalists do.

Brexit has all along been a political problem, not a commercial one. As one eminent German businessman commented under conditions of anon-ymity: ‘If you put 15 businesspeople in a room, we could sort out a deal in an afternoon.’ Which might cause us to wonder why we need a vast bureaucracy with an annual budget of €160 billion just to allow businesses to get on with the perfectly natural habit of trading with each other.

Remainers have almost exclusively made their case on economic grounds, yet in a manner far more fanatical than the businesses they claim to defend. One of the strangest aspects of the Brexit debate is how readily people on the left adopt neo-liberal beliefs about free trade when it supports their emotional predisposition. This may explain why such people have won so few converts; after all, it doesn’t sound convincing to hear leftists suddenly profess passionate concern for global supply-chains. Theirs is an emotional fear disguised as an economic argument; a bit like saying: ‘Please don’t nail my testicles to the table, it’s a very valuable table.’

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