Opinion: It Is Time to Stop Blaming Brexit for Every Business Challenge
The following is an opinion piece. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the editorial position of London Loves Commerce.
Brexit happened. It was disruptive, it had real economic costs, and some of those costs are still being felt. That is not in dispute. But the reflexive attribution of every business difficulty — from supply chain complexity to hiring challenges to sluggish productivity growth — to Brexit has become intellectually lazy and commercially counterproductive. It is time for British business to move on.
I make this argument not as a Brexit apologist — I was not, and remain not, particularly enthusiastic about how the exit from the EU was managed — but as someone who has spent two decades advising businesses on commercial strategy and who has grown weary of watching capable, imaginative business leaders use Brexit as a permanent excuse for problems that are partially or wholly attributable to other factors, and that are entirely within their power to address.
The Post-Rationalisation Problem
Many of the business challenges currently being attributed to Brexit are, on examination, global phenomena that would be present regardless of the UK’s relationship with the European Union. Supply chain disruption was a worldwide phenomenon driven by pandemic-related demand shocks and logistics capacity constraints — countries that remained within the EU experienced comparable difficulties. Inflation and the cost-of-living crisis are being experienced across Europe and North America, driven by energy price shocks and post-pandemic monetary policy. Hiring challenges in technology and specialist roles reflect a global talent market imbalance that predates Brexit by a decade.
Does Brexit add friction to some of these challenges? In specific cases, yes. Trade barriers have increased costs and complexity for businesses that import goods from or export goods to Europe. Some highly mobile European workers chose to relocate when freedom of movement ended. These are real effects and they should not be minimised.
Where the Energy Should Go
The more useful question for UK businesses today is not “how much would things be better without Brexit?” but “given the environment we actually operate in, what can we do to compete more effectively?” That framing leads to constructive action: identifying new markets in which to grow export revenue, investing in automation to reduce reliance on labour inputs that have become more expensive, developing domestic talent pipelines, and building supply chain resilience through diversification.
Some of the UK’s most commercially successful businesses of the past five years have been built by founders and leaders who treated the post-Brexit environment as a given — neither complained about it nor romanticised it — and focused instead on identifying the genuine commercial opportunities that the new landscape presents. Those opportunities exist, and they are significant. The UK’s relationship with the US market, the Gulf states, Southeast Asia, and other high-growth regions is not diminished by Brexit, and in some cases is actively strengthened by the bilateral trade deal negotiations that post-EU membership made possible.
A Final Word
I am not arguing for political amnesia or for abandoning advocacy on policies that could ease genuine Brexit-related friction. I am arguing that commercial excellence — in strategy, execution, talent management, and innovation — is the path to business success in the UK today, and that spending cognitive energy on an irreversible political decision is a poor allocation of a leader’s most precious resource: attention. The businesses that will thrive in London and across the UK over the next decade are the ones that are looking forward, not back.