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If you based your understanding of the UK economy on what you saw on the evening news you might've presumed Dover was Britain's most important port, that after a no deal Brexit there would be tailbacks everywhere and car manufacturing is our most important industry... 1/ 
In fact reality v different. Dover is Britain's ninth biggest port & is an outlier in the way it works (mostly accompanied roll-on, roll-off, eg trucks with drivers). Dover will face problems if there's a no deal Brexit. Other ports less so (provided they have time to prep) 2/
And for all that the car industry hogs the headlines, it accounts for abt 0.7pc of total GDP, similar to the rubber/plastics manufacturing industry and a tiny fraction of service sector industries like IT, real estate or finance 3/
One good thing to come out of Brexit is we're all now talking more abt globalisation: how UK fits into global economy and how intertwined our businesses and consumer habits are with the continent. It's a debate we've needed to have for decades 4/
While some would have you believe Brexit is a kind of Pandora's box that could have been left unopened, I strongly suspect we would have had to have these debates at some point. If not for Brexit they may have emerged via something like the gilets jaunes protests in France 5/
Nature of our lives has changed enormously. We now have to compete directly w/ Chinese/E European workers in a way we didn't in previous decades. Jobs less secure. Welfare less generous. Until Brexit we never had a proper vote on globalisation. So hurrah we're now debating it 6/
The problem is the debate still underplays the complexity of reality. Rather than considering the UK's trade position many people fixate on tailbacks at Dover (for obvious televisual reasons). Rather than look across the entire economy they focus on the car industry 7/
So even the more sophisticated analyses have hinged on what Brexit might mean for transcontinental supply chains and just in time manufacturing - the kind of stuff that matters enormously for the car industry. Yet what this ignores is that globalisation is changing 8/
Since 2007 supply chains have actually been shrinking. See this chart of trade intensity which is about the best proxy for supply chain activity. And see this @McKinsey_MGI report from Jan mckinsey.com/~/media/mckins… or this speech from @HyunSongShin bis.org/speeches/sp190… 9/
In other words globalisation was going into reverse even before Brexit, Trump or by some measures the financial crisis. That includes car supply chains (see chart) And tech such as robotics, AI & 3D printing could mean even more stuff is produced locally rather than globally 10/
Does this help make Brexit more bearable? Not really: supply chains still matter, even if they may not be the defining feature of 21st century globalisation. The consequence of new tech may be more REGIONALISATION (eg one factory for Europe instead of the world) 11/
But it's a reminder that the model of globalisation around which the EU was built may not be the relevant one in the future. And make no mistake; the EU was to a large extent a function of economics as much as politics. Consider this from the late, great Tony Judt: 12/
Anyway, these are a few of the issues I wrote about in my @thetimes column this week. Please do read the full thing here: thetimes.co.uk/article/brexit… ENDS
