An English Lord on a Dutch bicycle and Brexit.

On Friday morning I was dropping my eldest son at school in my default “working from home” uniform of shorts, Crocs (I know – but they are comfortable..) and some sort of cycling related t-shirt, looking at the other dads in the same routine and similar states of dress thinking that at the same time the day before I was in my City “uniform” (I’m sure I don’t have to describe it) stood next to Lord Howard Flight, near the Lloyds building, discussing “Brexit” with him and an audience of senior influencers from the City of London.

Now the thing is, Lord Flight impressed me by arriving early morning from the early launch of Metrobank (of which he is an NED) at the London Stock Exchange on his bicycle, and then, after spending some time with us, he headed back to Westminster and the House of Lords on two wheels. And this was not just any bike. As you might expect, Lord Flight doesn’t do drop handlebars. Nor a Brompton (even though he is a friend of the new CEO). No, it was a dignified “sit up and beg” style favoured by Edwardians and the Dutch. No helmet, no high viz, and certainly no Lycra. Unless he was wearing some bib shorts under his suit, but I don’t think that Gieves and Hawkes have them in their bespoke range.

Lord Flight was keen to assert his views and did so with candour. It was a really interesting, lively session, and made the point for me that right now there just isn’t enough good definitive data available, and, data aside, there are a great deal of highly emotive arguments for either position too.

From a TSG perspective, we’re not about taking a particular stance, but we do want to promote debate, and, given our mission and expertise as a business, for good reason.

The thing that strikes me about it all is the apparent uneasy calm.

Unless I’m missing something, if we leave this is going to create the biggest change for our country in terms of the political and economic landscape that we have seen in a very long time; as a consequence the way we do business will change and hence, necessarily, so will our business processes and the systems that support them. I remember the panic when there was a chance we might join the Euro. This is so much bigger than that.

We can’t even assume that we can have the timescales of a Brexit meet our needs as many of the aspects of what would happen if we do exit are already set out and hence the timescales could be imposed on us.

And yet we don’t seem to be anywhere near as excited about this.

An IPSO/MORI poll a few weeks back placed the “stays” at 60%, “leaves” at 20% and “undecideds” at 20%; a recent poll of polls in the Guardian appeared to say, disregarding the “undecideds” that, over time, as economic conditions improve, we become more favourable disposed towards Europe, but the overall desire to stay is marginal or leaving. I’m not a betting man but I think it’s possibly too close to call, as much because the sad truth is that there isn’t rally enough objective data to see what is going on.

 But surely – surely! – it’s time we starting thinking a little bit harder about what we will have to do should we make the decision to leave..

Are you thinking about it?