Facing such uncertainty, the best bet for businesses is to enter the commercial equivalent of hibernation until the future becomes clear.
The Brexit vote, the repeated delays to both the withdrawal deal and the subsequent EU trade agreement, and general elections in 2017 and 2019 that involved the serious risk that a far-Left Labour government led by Jeremy Corbyn could come to power created multiple event-horizon risks.
This specific type of risk has been less present in the US and the eurozone, where greater checks and balances impede or even prohibit sudden major change.
But there is a second side to this argument. By allowing more change, British politics also produces more churn.
Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Jeremy Corbyn and Nicola Sturgeon all had their fair chance and failed. And now, with its trial-and-error politics, Britain has haphazardly returned to the political centre while other countries have not.
Britain’s two major parties have turned to mainstream leaders. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Labour’s Sir Keir Starmer, much like their policies, are almost agonisingly low-wattage.
Alongside the return of centrism to Westminster, the self-inflicted crisis in the Scottish National Party (SNP) seems to have eliminated any serious risk of Scottish independence for the foreseeable future.
After 2016, the emerging narrative was that Britain had become a divided, populist basket case. Today, the facts no longer fit this view.
Instead, the UK is one of the few major economies that does not have either a populist in power or one waiting in the wings who is likely to win the next election.
UK politics now therefore compares favourably with that of its peers – most notably the US, which will suffer another bitter election in 2024. But it also applies to France and Germany, where populism is still in the political digestive tract.
