Brexit: Businesses will show more optimism when you give them reason to David Davis

Davis and Trade Secretary Liam Fox have called for more optimism. But that's not good enough for businesses that have to live, and trade, in the real world

The IoD says Government must involve business in Brexit if it wants its support

They need more optimism, because, yeah Brexit!

Listen, if they’re not prepared to put out more flags and have their staff sing hymns based upon the gospel according to BoJo and his three little Brexiteers, well, they’re just not bally well being patriotic, now are they. Yeah Brexit!

That basically encapsulates the position of the Government's hardcore Brexiteers, who appear to think that all the problems being thrown up by the ludicrous process they have embarked upon (even the head of the Leave campaign thinks triggering Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty was stupid) can be solved by shouting hey, wooh, yeaahhh, BREXIT ever more loudly and treating the leader page of the Daily Telegraph as if it were divinely inspired.

The problem is that, by contrast to Liam Fox, David Davis, Michael Gove, BoJo and the other madmen and women currently residing in Manchester, businesses have to live in the real world.

Businesses have to plan for the real world. They have to trade in the real world. And, with the exception of the bloke who runs Wetherspoons (Tim Martin), who has fully signed up to the Brexiteers' credo, they’re mostly tearing their hair out because doing business is currently extremely difficult, they have no idea about how trade with the biggest market for British goods will look in future, and it's next to impossible to plan if you don't know what you're planning for.

Which is why the rather pathetic calls for "more optimism" made by the Secretaries of State for Brexit (Davis) and Trade (Fox) at the Conservative Party Conference received rather short shrift from the Institute of Directors.

In case you were wondering, the IoD is made up of people who run businesses that have to do business in the real world, trade with it, and plan for how they think it's going to look. They simply cannot afford to live in the Brexit fantasyland conjured up by that risible pair and their disreputable pals.

IoD Director General Stephen Martin says he’d like to be able to support the Government "where we can". But he adds: “Doing so requires more openness and clarity of thought on the road ahead.”

No kidding.

He also says that Britain will only be able to capitalise on the “global opportunities” the Brexiteers keep banging on about if “we can address some of the more imminent risks ahead”. In other words, if we can address the risk of Britain chaotically crashing out of the EU, which bellicose trolls like BoJo have been intimating that the nation ought to be doing.

“Business wants to support Government in this time of uncertainty, but to do so we need to know where it thinks it is going first,” Stephen Martin says.

I would imagine, privately, that he would call for a degree of pragmatism from the Government; for something that would go further even than Theresa May's Florence speech, as opposed to BoJo with all his talk of red lines, or what is being said by Brexiteer MPs wrapped in an ideological straight jacket.

But publicly Stephen Martin is still, when all is said and done, trying his best to be constructive. He wants to be optimistic. So do his members. But he, and they, need to be given reason to feel that way first, and they're not getting it from the Government as things stand.

The problem for him, and for other business groups, and for the businesses they represent, is that the traditional party of business is choosing to ignore businesses unless they first agree to sing from the same hymn book as Tim Martin.

Most of them can't, and won't, do that because they simply can’t afford to.