'Workplace News': Thursday 11/06/20

As usual, there is a lot happening in the world. No further news of mass redundancies since yesterday [this was correct at time of writing but Centrica announced 5,000 redundancies 14 minutes later!] but that doesn’t mean it’s all quiet on the employment front by any means.

I am, unusually, going to focus on just one story today - from my friends and colleagues at BBC News. Business Editor, Simon Jack, to be precise:

‘Firms can't cope with no deal and virus [says] CBI boss’

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-53002961

It’s not ostensibly a piece about employment per se - but the impact on employment is blatantly obvious. 

You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to work it out.

In a nutshell, Dame Carolyn Fairbairn, the outgoing boss of industry body the CBI - the Confederation of British Industry - has said that British firms simply do not have the resilience to cope with a no-deal Brexit after the battering of the coronavirus crisis.

She said, and I quote, "As one member put it to me - just because the house is on fire, it doesn't make it ok to set fire to the garden shed.”

Gotta love that turn of phrase.

Brexit trade negotiations have not been going well between the UK and the EU.

Quelle surprise.

Dame Carolyn told the BBC that any buffers to cope with the additional cost and planning of an exit from the EU customs union and single market without a deal had been exhausted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

I shall quote Dame Carolyn again:

"The resilience of British business is absolutely on the floor.”

"The firms that I speak to have not a spare moment to plan for a no trade deal Brexit at the end of the year - that is the common sense voice that needs to find its way into these negotiations."

"If we have a political timescale that takes us to a brinksmanship deal in December that will be catastrophic for British business - they will not be ready.”

Relations between business groups and the government have been strained ever since the campaign leading up to the EU referendum of 2016, when business groups, including the CBI, warned of the potential economic damage to the UK economy, whose biggest customer is the EU.

My view on all this?

It makes my blood boil.

I am not by any means a hardcore Remainer – or Remoaner.  The EU is far from perfect.  And I’m not a great fan of Michel Barnier either for that matter.  But.  Come on!  Now is not the time for the UK to be taking – or making – a stand on the Brexit front.  We kind of have other things to worry about – like tens of thousands of people dead and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, losing their jobs.

Surely the sensible thing to do would be to shelve this whole Brexit mess for 6 months.

A year even?