"Fat and lazy"

I welcome Liam Fox���s claim that many British bosses are too ���fat and lazy��� to increase exports.

For one thing, it���s a good corrective to the ideology ��� too often promoted by the BBC ��� that bosses are infallible heroes to whom we owe deference and big pay-packets.

And for another, it contains some truth ��� and not just in the sense that businessmen are less assiduous in chasing a pound than Dr Fox. Most UK firms ��� more than 90% - don���t export at all. And the UK exports less as a share of GDP than comparable economies such as Italy, France or Germany (As a rule, smaller economies have higher export-GDP ratios that bigger ones.) This shouldn���t surprise us. In the real world, competition doesn���t grind so finely that it swiftly eliminates mediocrity, incompetence and laziness.

But here���s the thing. For many of us the fact that some businesses are ���fat and lazy��� was a key reason to favour remaining within the EU. When Brexiters told us that Brexit would allow us to reach free trade agreements with non-EU nations, our response was a fear that exporters would not quickly or sufficiently step up sales to non-EU countries. You can think of ���fat and lazy��� as micro-foundations for the gravity models of trade which underpinned the economic case (pdf) for Remain.

Which poses the question: what, then, is Fox doing?

I suspect it's another example of the (self?)-deception of Brexiters. He���s getting his excuses in early. If Brexit is followed by faltering exports, Fox will say it���s because businesses are too fat and lazy to take advantage of the opportunities he has created.

In this sense, what we���re seeing is an old trick of ideologues ��� that when your ideas fail, it is the fault not of their inadequacies but of the failure of reality to conform to the visions in your head.