Brexit Metaphor No 96.
Global bank HSBC moved its headquarters from Hong Kong to London in 1992 to be immune to potential uncertainty in Hong Kong after Britain's 1997 handover of the city to China. Going the other way, British vacuum maker Dyson now plans to move its headquarters from Britain to Singapore. Dyson claims this is not related to Brexit but is merely an attempt to capitalise on growth in Asia. However, its pro-Brexit founder James Dyson could not have chosen a more sensitive moment to announce this move.
If growth in Asia is the driving factor behind the HQ move, could Asia also explain many of the curses of globalisation for which Brexiting Britain has been blaming the European Union? Could the EU have served merely as an early harbinger of globalisation, as a continent-wide simulation which has in recent decades been rolled out on a global scale? But then shouldn't the UK Government also offer the British people a referendum on globalisation? It could end up even bigger than the 2016 referendum on the EU. And if it turns out that the World Trade Organisation (WTO) is part of the problem for "Leave-Globalisation" voters, what could the solution be when trading on WTO terms turns out to be the "enemy of the people"? ...Maybe urgently finding water on Mars and moving there?
The Singapore-on-Thames vision for London and Britain is increasingly looking like a chimera: a mythical creature with the head of a lion, the body of a goat and the tail of a snake. On the other hand, Singapore, the lion city, already has a real stone lion on its waterfront (the Merlion, pictured), and this lion is the mascot of the city.
The fact that a non-existent lion is losing out to an existing one almost sounds like a logical fallacy but it is not. Globalisation moves in mysterious ways its wonders to perform.
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| Merlion, the official mascot of Singapore (Source: Wikipedia) |
Notes:
1. Timeline: This article is part of a series of original #BrexitMetaphors published daily. A total of 96 have been posted so far and another 65 Brexit Metaphors will be published every day until the planned Brexit date of March 29, 2019.
2. Disclosure: The author has a master's degree in European Integration. He also thinks he knows a bit about business, economics, entrepreneurship, China, history, geography, nature, science and Rubik Cubes.
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Brexit is itself a "vacuum maker". The pun was not intended in the article above but is quite relevant. Making vacuum (in the physics sense) is usually an intentional act and is reasonably hard to pull off... except in politics, it seems, where it is happening by mistake.
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