Robotic surgery – state of the art in 2012,at Fort Belvoir Community Hospital, Va. Flickr/US army image. Some rights reserved.In many ways the hi-tech firm just outside Cambridge fits into a vision of an optimistic future for the British economy sketched out by breezy Brexit advocates.
In a leafy business park, highly educated workers dart around a lab fine-tuning the operation of a robot that could soon be performing keyhole surgery across the globe. A technician wearing 3-D goggles grips a surgeon console that looks as if it belongs in a virtual-reality arcade, not an operating theatre, and guides a mechanical arm on his screen so an instrument plucks a suture. Health industry representatives from the UK and Europe are due to arrive later that day to cast their eye over the prototype.
Brexit visionaries like Conservative European parliamentarian Daniel Hannan have argued that when the economy breaks free from the clutches of the European Union's overbearing bureaucracy, many such value-adding innovators will explore global markets from their newly deregulated, low-tax, UK base.
