General Election and Brexit – What you need to know webinar

With Parliament being dissolved today, currently (at least officially) you no longer have an MP. They’ll still carry on working up until the General Election, at which point in at least 60 constituencies where former MPs are standing down there will be new MPs and potentially in many other swing constituencies across the country.

Political parties have already swung into action with the main promises being a speedy 6 week Brexit from the Conservatives, a raft of social reform (and a massive Brexit delay to negotiate a brand new deal with the EU which would then be put to a referendum which Labour would largely vote against), an immediate cancelling of Brexit and revoking Article 50 from the Lib Dems, and a billion pound a year borrowing spree for a decade to turn the UK carbon neutral from the Green party.

Currently many of the General Election polls have the Conservatives well ahead with a predicted majority of Commons seats in the 70-80 range – a comfortable working majority. However you can probably take this with a pretty large pinch of salt as there were similar predictions for Mrs May last time around and she saw her majority slashed leading to back room deals with the DUP to shore up her government.

If you’re interested, Electoral Calculus will give a prediction for which party your next MP will be from, but that all depends how you vote, how much ‘tactical’ voting there is, and if any parties come to an agreement to not stand and attempt to gift the seat to their favoured second choice party.

The reality is that two of the most likely General Election outcomes are a Conservative majority or a hung Parliament, but there’s five weeks of campaigning when all of that could rapidly change. The biggest problem for voters will be do they vote along Brexit lines or do they vote based on domestic issues – the former probably would result in a Conservative majority whilst the latter is more likely to result in a hung Parliament.

Sign up for the Tamebay Brexit pre-Black Friday webinar

What most businesses want is an end to the uncertainty. Whilst there are still ardent remainers and ardent leavers, most businesses would simply prefer an end to the long drawn out uncertainty and repeated Brexit delays which have plagued the country for the past three years. It’s impossible to plan and businesses don’t want to invest until they know where they stand whether that be seeing Brexit take place or have the entire fiasco cancelled for good.

With the current Brexit plan, disruption would include customs forms for businesses trading domestically – if you ship to and from businesses in Northern Ireland from the Great Britain mainland customs forms will be a new bit of red tape to handle not to mention more forms for shipping to the EU27. For those who already ship internationally outside of the EU then the paperwork shouldn’t be overly complicated, but the payment of VAT and duty will create an additional burden that shouldn’t be overlooked.

That’s why we’re holding a Brexit Webinar ahead of Black Friday on the 20th of November. In partnership with GFS we’ll look at the potential Brexit scenarios facing online retailers and guide you through the steps you need to take to be prepared. We know you’ll be busy for the rest of the year, but there’s still an outside chance that the UK could leave the EU before the end of January 2020 and so making sure you are as prepared as possible is essential, even if it is a distraction at this time of year.

Sign up to attend the hour long Brexit webinar on the 20th of November here.