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Back in 2016, the UK voted to leave the European Union by 52% to 48% – a result so narrow it might as well have come with an asterisk. It didn't settle anything; it just froze the argument in place, and British politics has been arguing with itself ever since. Now the 10-year anniversary has come and gone, and the mood music has changed. What was sold as liberation increasingly looks, to a lot of people, like buyer's remorse dressed up in a Union Jack. The numbers don't flatter the decision. Exports and imports with the UK's largest trading partner have both fallen, and the trade deals signed since 2020 – the ones that were supposed to more than make up for it – don't come close to doing so.

AI has been a gift to small business marketing in plenty of ways. But there's one casualty nobody warned us about: Google Ads is having a rough time, and it's dragging small advertisers down with it. For years, this was the reliable workhorse – a low-cost way to get clickable ads in front of people searching on Google or scrolling YouTube. Simple, predictable, effective. Then AI overviews arrived and started eating the page. Now Google searches serve up a slab of AI-generated answer before a user even gets to the ads or organic links, and people have grown used to not clicking anything below the fold.