A couple of straws in the wind. First up, there was this from last week.
The first major free trade agreement signed by Britain after Brexit has been branded a failure after new figures showed exports had fallen since it came into force.
Liz Truss signed a "historic" deal with Japan as trade secretary in October 2020, describing it as a "landmark moment for Britain". It was claimed it would boost trade by billions of pounds and help the UK recover from the pandemic.
However, figures collated by the Department for International Trade show exports to Japan fell from £12.3bn to £11.9bn in the year to June 2022. Exports in goods fell 4.9% to £6.1bn and services fell 2% to £5.8bn.
Ouch. That's got to hurt. And as the piece notes, this was meant to mitigate any loss of trade from within the single market. Mind you, the Labour Party response does not instil confidence.
"The Conservatives have no trade policy worthy of the name and ministers are failing to stand up for UK interests in negotiations.
"This is making the huge economic damage they have caused even worse."
How does one 'stand up for UK interests in negotiations' if those being negotiated with aren't that interested in those interests? Why would Japan offer a better deal if the UK 'stood up' for itself? How has that worked with the EU? It smacks of the same misplaced boosterism that led to Brexit in the first place.
Also worth of note is the following:
Apart from Russia, [the UK] will be the weakest performer of the world's big economies next year, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
Then from this week there's this:
Most UK businesses have no interest in or understanding of the government's flagship "Brexit freedoms" plan to scrap EU regulations, according to a survey of bosses.
The British Chambers of Commerce (BCC) said almost three-quarters of company directors were either unaware of the government plans or did not know the details. Across all business areas, about half in the survey of almost 1,000 firms said deregulation was either a low priority or not a priority at all.
William Bain, the head of trade policy at the BCC, which represents thousands of firms of all sizes across the country, said: "Businesses did not ask for this bill, and as our survey highlights, they are not clamouring for a bonfire of regulations for the sake of it.
Indeed, if anything quite the opposite:
"They don't want to see divergence from EU regulations which makes it more difficult, costly or impossible to export their goods and services."
And the current economic climate makes any such divergence worse for Britain.
The BCC said there was little appetite among firms for UK rules to diverge significantly from EU regulations, warning that too many differences would add to company costs at a time when businesses were already struggling with soaring inflation and other barriers to trade with the EU.
And this supposedly pressing issue?
The BCC said as few as 4% of businesses comprehensively understood the Brexit freedoms bill and its potential impact on them. When asked which regulations they would keep, amend, or remove completely, more than half (58%) said they had no preference.
Speaking of divergence, what to make of this?
Business groups have previously experienced tensions between the views of their members and leadership on Brexit. Ahead of the 2016 referendum, the BCC's then director general, John Longworth, was suspended after suggesting Britain would be better off outside the EU despite two-thirds of members backing remain. Meanwhile, Lord Bamford, the chair of JCB, withdrew his firm's membership of the CBI over the lobby group's anti-Brexit stance.
What's clear is how much this was an ideological project unhitched to the actual processes that function on a day to day basis. And let us turn to no better authority than Bruce Dickinson of Iron Maiden to demonstrate this is in miniature. For Dickinson famously (to some) revealed that he had voted for Brexit in 2016. But when it came to the nuts and bolts of his business and cultural pursuits he found that the reality was different to what he had envisaged.
The Iron Maiden frontman, who previously revealed that he voted for the UK to leave the European Union in the 2016 referendum, told Sky Newsback in June that the UK government needed to "get your act together" in regards to UK musicians being able to tour in Europe post-Brexit.
His response to criticisms of his later stance are detailed in that link and need concern no-one overly much.
"It's not us I'm concerned about, it's the younger bands who don't have the time to go through all the paperwork and all the nonsense and there should be a way of streamlining those things for all performers. Culturally, we're all very close, and so I think it's something that needs to be a work in progress.
"I think it's people trying to score political points at a high level, disregarding the fact that people still live next door to one another and still want to visit each other. Yes, we will be economically different and yes, we will have a separate independent sovereign political leadership, which is what I voted for, but we still want to get along."
Suffice it to say that he still seems to suffer from a lack of understanding that the material structure of his interactions would indeed change on foot of his vote and not necessarily in ways that he would find congenial. There was this thing, what was it called, oh yes, mentioned above, called the Single Market, which facilitated less paperwork and 'all the nonsense' and remarkably also 'streamlined those things' for all 'performers'. But he can't quite own up to that.
In a way we could term this the Dickinson fallacy. He gets it, at least on one level, that Brexit in practice has driven a coach and four through his ability to play music in the EU, but he continues to state that somehow the outworking of what he himself wanted are unreasonable.
Dickinson is one person with essentially a single problem in relation to this. Britain is a state with multiple ones. That Dickinson fallacy is going to be trouble.
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