Business investment in Britain has flatlined since the EU referendum. The overall tax burden is at its highest since the Second World War and the bureaucracy blamed by Brexiteers for slow EU growth is worse in the UK. Huma Therapeutics is looking to follow Aim, the software designer, by listing in New York rather than London. Microsoft’s CEO says Europe is better for business than Britain and 1,000 other tech firms warned last week that the UK is falling behind its rivals in AI. The City pounds on, attracting 26 per cent of European foreign direct investment in financial services last year, and EY research says British firms create more jobs per new project than French ones do, although even that may point to a productivity gap in France’s favour. Bloomberg’s big pulse-take of Brexit Britain is a feast for die-hard Remainers susceptible to confirmation bias but it should also be a monstrous headache for the ideologues who contrived this mess.
