It was, admittedly, not quite as thrilling as an action sequence from Call of Duty. Even so, the statement put out by Bobby Kotnick, chief executive of US video game publisher Activision, following the UK’s bizarre decision to block the company’s acquisition by Microsoft was about as bloodthirsty as any ever put out by a major corporation. The ruling ‘contradicts the ambitions of the UK to become an attractive country to build a technology business,’ he argued. Even worse, ‘it does a disservice to UK citizens, who face increasingly dire economic prospects’, and, to cap it all off, it shows that Britain is ‘closed for business’. Of course, it would be easy to dismiss that as sour grapes from a man who has just seen $70 billion of Microsoft’s money slip through his fingers. And yet, in truth, Kotnick has a point. The UK is closed for business – and it is getting worse.

Tech policy nerds can no doubt debate the decision at length. Perhaps it will give Microsoft a bit too much power in the video games market, especially as games are increasingly stored in the Cloud instead of on discs that slot into a console. Possibly it will restrict competition and raise prices. Arguably all those teenage boys sitting by themselves blasting away at Nazis late at night won’t be getting as good a deal as they should be. Even so, there are two big problems with the UK’s decision.

The first is that it is ridiculous for Britain to pretend it can set standards for the global tech industry. The EU has been trying to do that for years and has ended up looking silly – and its economy is five times larger than ours. If the US wants to block the deal – which would see Microsoft acquire games such as Call of Duty and Candy Crush – then that is fine. But the UK will just end up looking as if it is pretending to be far more powerful than it really is.

The second – and more serious – problem is that it undermines the UK’s reputation as a country that is pro-business, pro-enterprise, and pro-innovation. Only a couple of days ago, the Prime Minister was trying to rebrand the country as ‘Unicorn Nation’ (‘unicorn’ is a label given to tech start-ups worth more than $1 billion). It might sound good, but this is also a country that has just increased corporation tax by more than a third in a single stroke; that has lowered the threshold at which it starts charging 45 per cent in income taxes; which has made such a mess of its energy policy that it can’t even build enough data servers in case they use up more power than is available (hardly a minor point for a tech business); and which is now trying to mimic the bureaucratic meddling of the EU in the American tech industry instead of trying to build competitors of its own. In reality, the UK is closed for business – and Kotnick is quite right to call that out.