If you talk to almost anyone overseas, except those at the right-wing extreme (like Trump) or part of a tiny minority of the left, their reaction to Brexit is similar that of the former prime minister of Finland. What the UK is doing is utterly, utterly stupid. An act of self harm with no point, no upside. Sometimes outside opinion is based on incomplete or biased information and should be discounted, but on Brexit it is spot on. So why are so many people in the UK unable to see what outsiders can see quite clearly?
The days when Leavers talked about the sunlit uplands are over. Liam Fox has not even managed to replicate the scores of trade deals the UK will lose when we leave the EU. As for independence, Leavers cannot name any laws imposed on the UK by the EU that they do not like. Since the referendum, even public attitudes to immigration have become much more favourable.
Instead there has emerged one justification for reducing real wages, for allowing our economy to lose over 2 per cent of its GDP, to allow firms to make and enact plans to leave the UK: the 2016 referendum. People voted for it, so it has to be done. It is described as the “will of the people”. Yet few bother to note that almost half the people voted the other way, with those that would be most affected not even having a vote – and that this victory was won by illegal means. All of that is brushed aside.
But what is really remarkable is the way that what this vote was originally for has gradually mutated over time. Just before the vote, the Leave campaign talked of many ways of leaving, with Norway (which is in the EEA) as one option. They did this for a simple reason: every time Leavers came up with a feasible way of leaving, other Leavers didn't like it. Yet within little more than a year Leavers were declaring that the vote was obviously to leave both the Customs Union and Single Market. During the referendum campaign the Leave side talked about the great deal they would get from the EU, but within two years, many of the same people were seriously pretending that voters really wanted no deal. A vote for the “easiest” deal in history has become a vote for no deal at all, apparently.
In much the same way, as Alex Andreou notes, what was once described as Project Fear transforms in time into “the people knew they were voting for that”. Claims there will be no short-term hit to living standards made before the referendum have now become “people knew there would be a short-term cost” – remember Rees-Mogg told us that short-term means 50 years.
www.newstatesman.com/politics/economy/2019/01/why-uk-cannot-see-brexit-utterly-utterly-stupid
- and to prorogue our own Sovereign Parliament to regain control, in the name of Democracy.