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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • Imagine that you’re locked in a room. You don’t know any Chinese, but you have a huge instruction book written in English that tells you exactly how to respond to Chinese writing. Someone outside the room slides you a piece of paper with Chinese writing on it. You can’t understand it, but you can look up the characters in your book and follow the instructions to write a response.

    You slide your response back out to the person waiting outside. From their perspective, it seems like you understand Chinese because you’re providing accurate responses, but actually, you don’t understand a word. You’re just following instructions in the book.













    • The campaign talked of frictionless trade deals with Europe, but while it looked good on paper the small print came littered with problems that made trade slightly harder than it had been as a member. The new customs processes has seen haulers transporting goods needing to fill out extra paperwork while new infrastructure has been needed to deal with queues.

    • The UK adopted a new points based immigration system, a promise of the Vote Leave campaign, in January 2021. This removed the right for EU workers to come to the UK without a visa and implemented the target to cut immigration to the tens of thousands. The target does appear unlikely, given the number of residence visas issued was higher in the year ending June 2022 than in any year since records began - with 1.2 million issued. Meanwhile, Brexit has created a shortage of 330,000 workers in UK.