19/08/2016
It's becoming clearer by the day that the remainers are not prepared to let go. They've not accepted the result of the referendum and are working consistently to overturn it. And, being helpful for once, we have the
Financial Times giving Richard Thaler a platform to tell us what the "remain" strategy really is.
Basically, from a stance where they were telling us that we could not possibly leave â or that it would be a disaster if we did â they are now telling us that we can leave, but it is
soooooo complicated that we'd better not even try.
This is what all this gloom and doom about the WTO "
schedule of commitments" is all about â a subject I will be returning to, just as soon as I've completed work on the Monograph I'm writing on the subject. It will show us is how the remainers are needlessly complicating the withdrawal process, adding elements that are really of no great concern, or which can be resolved fairly easily.
What Thaler is after, though, is a sustained barrage of propaganda to show that the decision to leave was so complicated that the choice was "impossible to evaluate sensibly". But, as the problems are stacked up, and people begin to realise how unwise leaving is, they should "be given the opportunity to change their mind if the facts change - either via a vote of parliament or a second referendum". In short, says Thaler, "Brexit should not mean (an immediate) Brexit".
Sadly, on the other side of the divide, the leavers seems to be playing into the hands of their counterparts, pushing for a "hard" Brexit which will bring about precisely the disasters about which we are being warned. In parallel, they are rejecting the Efta/EEA interim option and the Liechtenstein solution, which could get us out of the hole.
With a media which seems incapable of reporting sensibly on the issues, or getting past laborious Janet and John repetition of poorly understood basics, we have a situation where both sides of the debate are conspiring to deter us from leaving â one unwittingly â while the media hasn't the first idea of what's really going on.
What troubles me at a very personal level is my own ignorance, over a vast array of matters. But while I expend time and effort filling in the details, expanding my knowledge into areas that I feel are essential to understand the issues, we are simply widening the gap between the "knows" and the "know nots".
Pete and I chewed over some of these matters on
this audio clip, leaving us to despair at the poverty of the debate.
For a long while, I've been worried by the prospect of Article 50 negotiations that might fail, precipitating us into a disastrous "WTO option", almost by accident. But now, it looks equally possible that we could end up talking ourselves out of Brexit, simply because we've been unable to come up with a credible way of leaving.
The one hope we have is that we're only hearing white noise, and we'll not get any real politics until after the party conferences. But, unless by then the various actors are able to up their games, individually and collectively, there is not so much room for concern as good cause for screaming panic, with us rushing for the nearest exit. And that one doesn't get us out of the EU.
Sadly, though, nothing coming out of Whitehall gives us any confidence that we're going to see much improvement, in which case we need to be reserving places in the queue for that emergency exit. Before that, the greater peril might be that the sheer tedium of the debate will drive us to distraction. If we're going to get anywhere at all, something has to break.
