English: Liam Fox, British Conservative politician. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
This penetrating article suggests that with a series of inaccuracies in a speech at the WTO, Liam Fox isn’t even doing the prep work for a hard Brexit.
Source: Fox slip up at WTO shows he has no Brexit plan
This is very worrying. Senior ministers need more than rhetoric, they must be experts in the detail. Liam Fox must remember the devil’s in the detail. But it also shows that his ministry is underweight in terms of expertise. The implication is more risk with a hard-Brexit.
Thoughts?
Dr Alf's Blog 
Dr Liam Fox does not move fast enough, think ahead fast enough or plan ahead fast enough, although he was right about British business people being lazy golfers unwilling to get on planes and export things.
Dr Alf is right there are risks with Brexit, both hard and soft if we put up Ministers like Fox with insufficient grasp of the detail and negotiators who cannot negotiate their way out of a paper bag.
The overall approach is wrong headed, unimaginative and complacent because we should be energising UK business people to engage in exports now.
We need to be creating the conditions for a quadrupling of the export sales force now, improving the language skills of UK business with a crash programme of Pimsleur language skills training, creating websites hosted in relevant countries in the EU with shopping carts designed for native speakers to facilitate sales within the “Single Market”, creating nearshoring ALMO solutions to circumvent passporting rights losses for the City and improving corporate tax regimes and writing down allowances for firms engaged in exporting activity in key sectors where the UK has or could have global market leadership.
We and Dr Fox are being advised by brain dead civil servants and lawyers who think narrowly and lack the commercial nous to drive a coach and horses through EU and WTO legislation and who cannot see how by creating what the Israeli’s call “Facts on the Ground” we can make many of these legalistic discussions meaningless as the Chinese, South Koreans and Germans have been doing for years.
Dr Fox and the UK Government are in snooker terminology “Behind the 8 ball”; they need to step up and start the process of “streetfighting” and controlled chaos that is required to build a fire under our sleepy corporatocracy and replace armies of sleepy “Sir Humphries” with can do live wire people who “focus and obsess” whilst getting things done.
John, thanks for sharing your views. I agree that the Three Brexit ministers need to pull their finger out.
It will be interesting to see the Chancellor’s Autumn statement to parliament and whether he’s going to be sufficiently radical in stimulating investment, exports and skills improvement.