What's the best way to help small businesses? Forget about Brexit

The PM has convened a summit with representatives of small and medium sized enterprises. They're at the sharp end of the bleak economic data we've been seeing

Tumbling pound just one consequence of Brexit facing small business (GETTY)

“From dynamic start-ups to established family firms, our small and medium firms are the backbone of our country. I want to build an economy that works for all, and that means working with, and listening to smaller firms.”

So said Prime Minister Theresa May ahead of a summit with small businesses, or at least with representatives of the 5.4 million of them that operate in the United Kingdom. Oh to be a fly on the wall.

The spin doctors will no doubt be telling tales of constructive dialogue, and working together, and similar such guff in its wake. There may even be a press release or two telling the same story.

But the small business lobby will have seen the same economic data that everyone else has been seeing, and it isn’t good. Its members will also have seen that data. Chances are they’ll be feeling the impact very soon, if they aren’t already. No one likes a recession, but one is surely coming.

The best thing for the economy, and for the small and medium firms that are the backbone of it, would be for Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty never to be triggered. The bookies are increasingly of a mind that it won’t be.

One wonders what our "Brexit means Brexit" PM and her ministers - especially the Brexiteers among them - will be saying to those small firms that tell them that the way to construct an "economy that works for everyone" is to forget about Brexit.

Or, failing that, to at least retain access to the single market, even if that does mean abiding by the rules of the club, such as accepting the free movement of people.

Small businesses are often quite keen on that, because, as Mrs May knows well, they employ people. Sometimes that means importing people from overseas. That is a natural consequence of a modern economy that works for all.

Unfortunately, we may need to go through a really brutal recession to persuade people that it might be a good idea to have another think about things. Right now there are still too many empty heads banging on about “real Brexit” heedless of the number of people, and businesses, that will be hurt by that.