13/04/2014
Although the original plan was to do it big, Booker decided in
this week's column to give the IEA's Brexit competition the attention it deserves in the legacy media â i.e., very little indeed. A badly organised and failed competition deserves to slide quickly into obscurity, which it already seems to be doing.
Thus, writes Booker, whoever put up the £95,000 in prizes offered by the IEA for the best essays on how Britain could hope to exit the EU might wonder whether they got value for money. He picks up on the
Financial Times piece that
we reviewed, noting journalist John McDermott's view verdict of the winning entry: "If this is the case for Brexit, I worry for Eurosceptics".
Picking up on the detail of the "essay", we see that the "most likely" scenario offered by Iain Mansfield's muddled paper was that, while we might lose £9.3 billion a year in trade by leaving the single market, we could make £2.1 billion by increasing our trade with the rest of the world, save £2.5 billion by repealing various regulations, and end up £1.3 billion better off.
This entry, writes Booker, may accord with views expressed by several of the judges, led by Lord Lawson, that we should not even stay in the EEA, thus excluding ourselves from the single market.
And, in talking fancifully about how much we could save by not having to obey all those EU regulations, none of the winning entries seemed aware that so much regulation now derives from global bodies above the EU that we would still be stuck with it anyway.
Any Europhiles who read those pretty dismal papers, Booker concludes, "could rejoice that, if this is the best the Eurosceptics can produce, the battle to stay in is already won".
The interesting thing, though, is the treatment of this issue by Booker's
commentariat. His number two is a climate change story headed, "No A-level for 'climate change denier'". This retails "Brainwashing about global warming" that "percolates throughout the education system". Predictably, this swamps the comments. "Brexit" hardly gets a look in.
This maybe reflects something of the bigger picture. Even those who profess an interest in EU affairs are more comfortable with complaining about the "EUSSR", its "tyrannies" or some such. Rarely do they creep out of their comfort zones to address the difficult and complex issues of how we leave - the nuts and bolts mechanics.
But given the opportunity to fulminate on climate change, this easily takes preference, leaving "Brexit" a cold and lonely orphan. There is our crisis point. Unless we can energise this debate, and get some real momentum behind it, we are truly lost.
That, in the final analysis, may turn out to be the most damaging aspect of the IEA's shambolic handling of the Brexit competition. A significant amount of money has been spent, huge effort expended and the result has been to poison the well, closing down rather than opening up the debate. This, we really cannot afford.
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