As a business owner, I like to be able to see into the future. My days are focused on planning and forecasts and of course executing those plans.
Over the past few years I have worked with companies in France, Germany and the States. Currently, I have two in going conversations about work in multiple European countries.
But how can I plan for this if I don’t know what the rules will be?
There are less than 200 days before Brexit and we don’t know what’s going on.
Right now we are operating on SNAFU, situation normal all..well you can fill in the rest.
This state of limbo is just the start of uncertainty, even if an agreement is reached it will be so broad that how it impacts individual industries won’t be seen for a number of years.
But it is already impacting businesses and lives. My business is supported by an EU backed initiative that provides access to help and mentoring. That will go. A friend told me on Friday that he is officially at risk, a pre-redundancy state, as the company that he worked at for eight years is partially funded by the EU.
It could be argued that these programs could continue as the government would be able to use some of the money that we’ll no longer be giving the EU. But the government has given no commitment to any such undertaking.
In the run-up to the referendum, we were told that the money we gave could be reallocated into the NHS. But the figures bandied about by the politicians didn’t account for support of existing projects.
I understand that the amount of projects funded by the EU in the UK doesn’t amount to the money we pay in. But there has been no talk of ring-fencing money for these existing projects.
This is just one example of the uncertainty we face.
We were told it would all be simple and that we’d be better off. I thought then, as I do now, that there could be some real benefit of being out of the EU. But my worries about our lack of ability to negotiate a beneficial exit have unfortunately been proven to be true.
No one, remainer or leaver, is going to be satisfied by the negotiated outcome. These things should have discussed in far more detail before the referendum. We were ill-formed and ill-prepared.
That is why I am supporting a second referendum based on what we know when a final deal is reached.
And for those of you who don’t know what SNAFU means look it up, there is a lot to learn in this world but some things never change.