Australia's warning

Hot on the heels of Japan’s striking intervention, Australia has now warned that a post-Brexit deal would be a long time coming and would be subordinate to negotiations with the EU. Meanwhile, Reuters is carrying a damning assessment of the UK’s ability to negotiate future trade deals.

The assumption (or hope) must be government ministers – especially those charged with Brexit – are getting a crash course in these realities which were, of course, dismissed as Project Fear during the Referendum campaign.

Similarly dismissed were the pre-Referendum warnings of budget airlines like RyanAir that Brexit would make them less likely to invest in UK operations. This, too, turns out to be true and yesterday the Irish company announced that none of their 50 new planes would be based in the UK as a result of Brexit. We can expect a trickle of such announcements during the current ‘phoney war’, which will become a flood if the outcome is hard Brexit.