Sensors, Smartphones and Shortbread

Protectionism As the globe descends into a protectionist tit-for-tat, our nations might seem further apart than before. However, the distance between us continues to reduce, physically, digitally and culturally. As of this year, you can travel to Australia on a non-stop flight. Next year will mark the test run for Boom Supersonic’s test flight – a commercial airliner which will travel from London to New York in 3 hours 15 minutes (quicker than Concorde). Mobile video calling, once hideously expensive and now free, allows us to connect visually with friends and colleagues from around the world, (in 2017, 17 billion video calls were made using Facebook Messenger alone). And globalisation, M&A and third world development is reducing the commercial and cultural differences between nations as brands increasingly transcend domestic boundaries. The national barriers which separate us have, due to inevitable globalisation, become more artificial than the commercial markets and brands that we have in common. With taxes and public spending largely measured and applied at a national or local level, it is human nature to want to appropriate as much of that for ourselves as possible. However, putting trade barriers into a world which has outgrown nation states has, at best, a feeling of futility.