What Next?

[Margrethe]

I have moved through the stages of shock and grief and now want to think about what we need to do as a country to succeed. I'd like to hear other people's ideas too. Enough with the doom mongering! It's a time of great risk, but also of opportunity. I'll throw out my nascent thoughts. I know they are far from perfect or "the answer," but I'd like to get a little bit of constructive conversation going. (I know nitpickers will come along and complain and critique, I could do myself; it's easier than being constructive and creative.)

Here are some things I think we need to do:

1. Increase airport capacity in the SE: we can't pivot away from Europe and towards the rest of the world without it

1. Renew Trident: we are more on our own now and we need it to stay a relevant part of NATO, frankly; we should consider moving the subs from Faslane in Scotland (The Scots don't want them!) to Portsmith or perhaps Millhaven in Wales where they really need the jobs after the Port Talbot closure and some of the heavy industry skills might be transferable

1. Pull the plug on the Hinkley Point Nuclear power project. That should now be a project for building up UK capabilities and jobs not a pork barrel for the French. At the very least it should be a bargaining chip going forward.

1. Start rewriting UK public contracts to favour UK based subcontractors and suppliers, eg. we are buying more rolling stock for our railways all the time, we really should favour buying from domestic producers

1. Start some high profile scientific projects with the best universities in Asia (Tsinghua, Peking, Tokyo, Singapore, etc.)

1. Don't start negotiations with the EU from a position of compromise. It's pretty obvious that people voting leave want control over immigration so rocking up and asking for the Norway deal as your starting point is unbelievably stupid. (For this reason, Nicky Morgan is a terrible candidate for leader.) Start asking for what you really want, free trade with control over immigration. You never know how far you will get, if you try. At the moment, it all feels horrible, but we should be doing an inventory of every lever that we have and understanding what the different players in the EU want and need. We also need to baseline the worst case scenario (WTO terms, so we have a reference point.) There are actually an infinite number of possible outcomes. We can help ourselves by being creative. If our banks (a major industry for us) need Euro Passporting how can we bargain? Can we link a certain number of guaranteed visas for EU migrants to the amount of passporting we do in a year?

1. We need a chancellor who will invest heavily in the UK and fund that investment with borrowing. Now is a time for expansionist policies.

Basically, lets start thinking instead of panicking.

(BTW, I voted remain. I just think rowing back isn't practically possible or at this point desirable. We have had the economic shock now.)

Those are my thoughts at the moment. What have you got? Please share!

Interesting discussion about the air industry! I know nothing but find it a fascinating area. My understanding was that airlines struggle to make a profit already unless the flights are fully loaded. If so, then freeing up more capacity in the skies wouldn't result in more routes being added unless the airlines perceived a big demand.

Airlines will generally serve particular countries/ airports if it's profitable to do so. BA has cut flights to South America and Africa in the last couple of years. This isn't necessarily because of lack of demand, but because of competition. I don't know much about services to South America but I'm a frequent flyer to Africa and BA is not competitive on some of these routes, probably partly for historical reasons.

www.businesstraveller.com/discussion/topic/BA-considering-cancelling-more-African-routes

I definitely don't want to debate the airline industry because I am out of my depth!

Just listening to the nightly news over the years I've picked up the fact that they keep telling us Heathrow is at 99% capacity. I realise that if we want to open up new trade routes and deepen connections, it will be necessary to have better, more convenient access to these places. So I've made the jump that if a lot of the world is poorly served now, those routes won't have a chance to be developed, if we don't have landing slots for them anyway.

Saying the routes won't work anyway because the planes won't be full is a little bit of a circular problem. There isn't much truck between us because we don't do much trade. We don't do much trade because we don't have much connection or many relationships.

Some how, to move forward we have to break that cycle. Or we will have given up easy trade with Europe with nothing to replace it.

Or we will have given up easy trade with Europe with nothing to replace it.

This emphasises the importance for pragmatic business people of moving away from ideological arguments (leave/remain) and focussing on single market access.