Introducing this week's theme: UK business and trade after Brexit

The economy will be centre stage when Brexit negotiations begin in 2017. All week we’re looking at the possible consequences of different types of Brexit on specific sectors and the economy as a whole.

Uta Staiger is the executive director of the UCL European Institute.

Benjamin Martill joined UCL in 2016 as a Research Associate. He has previously worked as Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at Canterbury Christ Church University, Lecturer in International Relations at Wadham College, Oxford, and Associate Lecturer at Portsmouth Business School. Benjamin received his DPhil from the University of Oxford in 2015 for his thesis on the party politics of Cold War strategy.

That the British decision to leave the European Union in the 23 June referendum will have profound consequences for the country’s economic policy and the future of its trade relations is no news. The economy not only loomed large in voters’ priorities pre-referendum; it still vies with immigration for the top spot in people’s expectations of Brexit. It remains an issue, which, depending on your interlocutor’s political beliefs, acts as a proxy for all that Brexit stands for: it is either opportunity or disaster, liberation or curse, the dawn of a new age or the self-exile of a country to the global backwaters.

If business and trade have thus substantively dominated the Brexit agenda from the get-go, the views from many trade representatives as well as ‘experts’ hailing from different institutional contexts were perhaps overly politicised. With policymakers now considering the exact kind of relationship Britain should secure with the EU, of course, the likely repercussions of commercial and trade relations the government will seek to establish with the continent need more attention than ever.

As always, however, the devil is in the detail – and in the forever vexed question of how accurately one might model the eventual outcome of today’s policy decisions. Paradoxically, in a debate where the freedom of trade predominates, it is now all about the political in our political economy: the state-devised, supervised and instituted organisation of economic interaction.

In this guest week as well as our half-day public discussion event at University College London on Wednesday, 14 December, we bring together experts from academia, law, financial and regulatory services, start-up businesses and commerce bodies to critically examine the place of business and commercial interests in the negotiations and beyond.

By doing so, the authors attend to the different agendas, which economic sectors in Britain represent and defend. They also discuss the likely nature of Britain’s trade and economic relations with the continent after Brexit, and assess the risks and opportunities associated with the various options. Among the questions they raise are those concerning the effect of Brexit on the UK’s regulatory landscape; its trade pattern; the institutional form of its post-Brexit trading regime; and the direction of travel of post-Brexit economic policy.

What draws the wide range of contributions together is the recognition, poignantly formulated now that we have moved from campaign to negotiation mode, that Brexit is no monolith. It is a vastly complex, multifaceted and time-consuming process with an unstable set of interdependent and only partially controllable elements. Likely to be neither black nor white, neither good nor bad in its entirety, we only begin to grasp what the new settlement might entail – and just what it might take to get there.

In the process, one insight seems already to be gaining ground: whatever the pure economic case, it will always be intertwined with and, crucially, delimited by, political will and viability. In this minefield, we must make a renewed case for reasoned debate, discussion, and the careful weighing up of the evidence. We may not yet know what kind of future will come our way; yet we must understand, to the greatest degree possible, what may shape and influence it.

This guest week is the third in our Brexit Division series. The first two, published prior to the referendum, examined first how and when campaign strategies shift public opinion, and then migration as the key opinion shaper and point of controversy in these campaigns. The series is co-funded by the European Commission Representation in the UK.

Monday: The post-Brexit economy

Iain Begg (‘The Economy after Brexit’) analyses the most recent data on the UK’s economic performance in the aftermath of the referendum. Noting the surprise with which many greeted the reasonably positive data on the economy, Begg interrogates the underlying factors driving this growth. He claims it is disingenuous to argue the effects of Brexit have yet to register, since some of the Treasury’s concerns have been borne out, but the country’s economic performance is not as poor as predicted. Yet he regards as equally disingenuous the claim that Brexit will not have detrimental effects on the UK economy, since the transition process has yet to begin and UK growth based on consumer spending may be difficult to sustain in the long-term. Ultimately, Begg argues we need to pay close attention to the underlying drivers of current economic growth and to shy away from simplistic predictions of disaster or success after Brexit, since the available data to date supports neither thesis.