This campaign has some big names...400 have signed, including @twiggy @YLBofficialsite Yasmin Le Bon, Nick Knight, @RoksandaIlincic @laurabailey_uk and serious industry players, who now see how badly an industry like fashion gets squeezed by #brexit /6

These luminaries want some kind of 'fix'...as Helen Brocklebank, CEO of @Walpole_UK says 42% per cent of UK luxury export sales are from the EU. The #Brexit costs and admin mean many of her members "have concluded they simply can’t afford to continue selling to those countries"/7

Isabel Ettedgui, the chief executive of Savile Row brand Connolly, which sells Scottish cashmere and manufactures leather goods in Spain says its an existential challenge for "a 185-year-old company that holds the Royal Warrant" /8

Katharine Hamnett, the fashion designer best known for political T-shirts and championing ethical business practices, says "brands will die" without a radical overhaul of customs & VAT arrangements /9

These are big names, but they are the front of house for a huge number of small traders - the button makers, the jewellery makers, the leather workers, stylists etc that fitted into an industry that has grown up on free movement - which is now at an end /10

And as Barnier aid @StefaanDeRynck observed after the musicians made similar pleas...well, that's what happens when you don't have a 'mobility chapter ' in the deal' - welcome to a new world of #brexit /11 https://twitter.com/StefaanDeRynck/status/1351935092940279808?s=20

So where is the British government in all this? Well, pretty impotent really - it just issues statements saying it is working with industry, it wants to "seize new opportunities" and, oh, it has helplines that it spent money on...but then what else can it say? /12

Fashion is a big UK success story - 1.6% of UK GDP, growing 11% a year - and trading with New York or Tokyo or China really isn't going to help a lot of those SMEs offset the losses that come with a deal that makes it a pain to buy British, sell to the EU, hire a UK model /13

There are some things in the UK's gift that @FashionRoundTab is asking for - like putting garment workers on the occupation shortage list, but on the really big stuff - customs, VAT, free movement - well, that's what we asked for. We wanted to be Canada...now we are /14

There is still hope in some industries that as #COVID19 lifts, as the UK erects the same customs borders as the EU in July (and EU traders and professionals feels the same pinch) that 'common sense will prevail and that easements and fixes will emerge..../15

But given the politics at the moment - UK refusing EU ambo full recognition, the spats over #COVID19 vaccines, the clusterf*** over the Irish protocol last weekend, the appointment of Lord Frost "Captain Sovereignty" as chief #Brexit guy, I'm not sure I'd bet on it /16

The fashion industry is of course right to campaign hard as it can, for whatever it can get, but as @SamuelMarcLowe has observed, there are hard limits - whether on professional services, or hubbing goods into the EU from the UK - on what can be achieved /17

The #COVID19 pandemic gives the govt some breathing space...but sooner or later, you'd think the government will have to start to explain what the point of all this is? Other than alluding to the mythical 'sea of opportunity'...which may start to grate when folks are drowning END