Wasn't Scottish independence supposed to be the price for Brexit? Why then did the SNP poll badly?

I think the first thing to grasp is that Brexit fundamentally altered the case for Scottish independence. You have to remember that Scotland voted for the UK to remain in the EU, not for Scotland to remain alone if the rest of the UK left.

When both Scotland and the rest of the UK were in the EU, there would have been no customs border between the two, even after independence. After Brexit, for Scotland to rejoin the EU would have meant a customs border applicable to two thirds of Scottish trade.

It would also have precluded continuance of the UK Free Travel Area, since there is free movement of people inside the EU and the FTA would have negated any UK policy to control immigration. Obviously, the UK would not allow this. (Ireland was able to remain in the CTA because as an old EU member it was not obliged to join Schengen; new members are obliged to join).  In other words, Scots could no longer expect to move south freely in pursuit of economic opportunities.

New members of the EU (including Scotland) are also expected to have managed their own currency competently for two years and to commit to joining the Euro. As an old member, the UK had an exemption. Scotland has no currency of its own, nor any separate central bank. Using sterling as a foreign currency would be possible, but would not qualify Scotland for EU admission.

New members of the EU are expected to achieve a fiscal deficit target that Scotland would need about ten years of austerity to achieve, according to the Wilson Report. This would be particularly acute if the UK immediately cut off Barnett funding, stopped military expenditure in Scotland, and declined to continue the currency union, all of which would have been perfectly legitimate.

Thus, it was improbable that an independent Scotland could make a swift return to the EU, and independence would mean standing alone for at least a decade.

In spite of this, the SNP continued to agitate for independence and to neglect the day job of actually running an efficient devolved administration. The results eventually became too obvious to ignore.

Additionally, after the coalition with the Greens, the SNP began to pursue a whole agenda of politically correct policies which did not resonate with the Scottish electorate at large.

To this you have to add the impact of various scandals. The burdens accumulated until they could no longer be borne.

But I think you are wrong to see the Labour Party as pro-Brexit. Starmer was one who campaigned for a second referendum, and is still not trusted to not make unnecessary concessions to the EU in trade negotiations.

In short, Brexit did not figure highly in the list of reasons for voters abandoning the SNP.

Who is benefitting the most from the Brexit chaos? (Quora)

Are you all sitty comfybold on your toileybox earlymordy? Goodly gumdrops swill beginification.

I personobly also finding much sardonifaction in ratiocinating aborderline nincompoopdom questiposers hereabovely. One of these upsidaisies will edgeup shaking loose remaigelling braincell and fal-folollop whoopsibuttercup over EUniversal translaming. Oh yes, deep joy.

Til then, neddle abiding more quasitellification supposiaskiform, sadly.

How should the old Brexit Slogans be Updated for 2021? (Quora)

I hesitated to answer this question, since the five-year-old ashes of the referendum campaign are stone-cold and blown away by a great wind called Covid that neither side foresaw.

In the wake of the genuinely catastrophic damage done to the world by that wind, the hyperbolic 2016 claims of Brexit catastrophe should ideally be quietly forgotten and the widely-foreseen adjustment problems of leaving the EU pale into insignificance. I don’t think efforts to blame Brexit for worldwide phenomena reflect much credit on those concerned.

Suffice it to say that nearly all Remain slogans should today be amended by the addition of a single word. The word in question is ‘not’. I’m sure you can work out for yourselves where it needs to be added in each case.

There really was only one important Leave slogan: ‘Take back control’. No-one seriously expected British politicians overnight to become hugely efficient paragons of virtue. In fact, we expected it to be quite tricky to take over from the remote pilot that had been charting our course for so long. But the crucial thing is, if British governments mess up, we can get rid of them.

As it happened, the first result of taking back control was the UK’s much-condemned, but in the event astute, decision to go it alone on the development and distribution of Covid vaccines. This led to an early start to the recovery of economic growth that outpaced the rest of the EU.

Major economic changes, like any long-term investment, usually have their costs front-loaded and benefits delayed. In the circumstances, the UK has been fortunate to see some early benefits. Before the pandemic, Leave-favouring economists tended to estimate five years or thereabouts to break-even. It may turn out to be slightly less; we’ll see.

But for better or worse, it’s done. What on earth is the point of seizing upon every piece of news that, unremarkably, tells us there are costs as well as benefits?

We need to go forward, not keep looking back to the road not taken.

Brexit, Democracy, and Casablanca

Our scene - outside some bar or other in London:

Police Chief: What in Heaven’s name brought you to the UK?

Rick: My politics. I came to the UK for the democracy.

Police Chief: The democracy? What democracy? We’re in an elitist oligarchy.

Rick: I was misinformed.

There you are. I always knew that piece of dialogue would come in useful someday. All right, I modified it. Just a little.

But today in the UK a lot of people feel just like Rick. We’ve always been told we live in a democracy. Not just any democracy, but one of the oldest and finest in the world.

Except it turns out that we don’t.

You want to know more? You’ll regret it. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life.

But I’ve got a job to do.

Scratch the surface and the very same attitudes that resisted the widening of the franchise and the elimination of the property qualification for voting back in the nineteenth century are alive and well today. There are still bien-pensants aplenty who think that ordinary people don’t really understand the issues, are insufficiently well informed, are stupid, racist and in fact thoroughly unpleasant. In an ideal world, such people wouldn’t be allowed to exist. But somebody has to do the manual work, I suppose.

For a while, you can get away with lying to the people. You see, they’re so ignorant that the idea of their social betters lying to them just never crosses their minds.

“There are some in this country who fear that in going into Europe we shall in some way sacrifice independence and sovereignty. These fears, I need hardly say, are completely unjustified.” - Prime Minister Edward Heath, January 1973.

Oh, yes. Remember that one?

Not an easy day to forget.

Only now we can read the memo that was sent to Heath about it. The one where he was warned of “the ultimate creation of a European federal state, with a single currency. All the basic instruments of national economic management (fiscal, monetary, incomes and regional policies) would ultimately be handed over to the central federal authorities.”

That’s all right, the top men said, just as long as the plebs never find out. Don’t worry, guys, we’ll tell them it’s just a free trade area.

I’m shocked! Shocked to find that lying was going on here in the UK!

Now, of course, all this was more than forty years ago. Surely, it’s not relevant today?

Oh no. Of course it isn’t.

Look, I’m no good at being noble, but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.

Remember Maastricht? It’s okay, we’ve got opt-outs; none of this EU integration stuff will ever affect the UK. Text? What text?

Remember Lisbon? So embarrassingly similar to the rejected EU Constitution on which we’d been promised a referendum that the UK PM had to turn up a day late and sign when hardly anyone was looking?

And remember how, before the referendum, the UK PM was going to negotiate a reformed EU where everything would be hunky-dory? Except it turns out the EU doesn’t want to reform because it thinks everything’s hunky-dory already, exactly on track.

Oh, well. Round up the usual suspects. Greece, Cyprus, Spain, Italy, Portugal- all you disorganised, hopeless countries with your hopeless levels of youth unemployment. Yes, and all you Eastern European states that don’t fancy freedom of movement for the vast number of refugees/immigrants admitted by Germany. It’s all going well, do you hear?

But do you want to know what’s really funny?

These days the plebs have figured it out. These days the plebs know they’re being lied to and have been lied to for decades. These days the so-called ignorant are the ones who actually realise what’s going on.

And who is it who now believes the propaganda that the powers-that-be have been spouting for fifty years?

Oh. You spoiled my surprise. You guessed it. It’s the bien-pensants of course. The smart people. The trendy classes who think there really is a pot of international brotherly love at the end of the EU rainbow.

Well, here’s looking at you, kids. You know how you sound? Like someone who’s trying to convince himself of something he doesn’t believe in his heart.

So to all my dispirited friends, watching the news, reading the papers and feeling more and more depressed, I say - Welcome back to the fight. This time I know our side will win.

Has Representative Democracy Failed In The UK?

I was recently asked this interesting question of Quora. Here's my answer:

Logically, in order to establish the success or failure of any system, we must first discover its intended objective and then the time frame over which we shall measure.

For representative democracy, there may not even be a universally accepted objective. Different people or different cultures, at different times, in different circumstances may seek different outcomes.

Abraham Lincoln famously defined democracy as government of the people, by the people, for the people.

A century and a half later, there are still many who believe his middle phrase to be a step too far. Some issues, they will tell you, are just too complex for the people to grasp; such decisions should be left in the hands of those who know what’s good for the people, by which term they mean, of course, people like themselves.

On the other side of the argument are ranged democrats who believe that everyone is the world’s leading expert in how things affect themselves. One does not need to be able to explain why rain falls in order to know that when rain falls one’s roof leaks. However, if the government is made up entirely of well-off people who don’t have leaky roofs then this problem is unlikely to be considered, let alone solved.

So now let’s extend the problem to cover not just leaky roofs but homelessness, substandard housing, overcrowding and so on. Do the people who suffer from these, and other social evils, have a right to be heard and to participate in the examination and solution of their problems, or should a paternalistic ruling class decide and administer what they consider to be in the poor’s best interests? Seems easy enough?

But before we run away with the idea that democracy solves everything, let’s consider the problem of hard choices. In the NHS, for example, everyone considers that their own needs should be attended to, but when we add up the implied expenditure from attending to everyone’s needs, we find we have a sum much larger than we are collectively willing to pay for the NHS.

The concept of representative democracy is supposed to provide a forum within which competing needs and wants of individuals in society can be prioritised in a rational way. In principle, we enjoy competition for power between different philosophies with different priorities, of which two important ones are wealth creation and wealth distribution. Usually, in order to win and hold power, some sort of centrist compromise has had to emerge.

The problem we face today is that, over time, the political parties embodying these philosophies have become transformed from organic plants, growing in the soil of local communities and nourished by local culture and information, into hothouse blooms that can only exist under London glass. Our nominal representatives have less and less genuine interaction with us, the people they supposedly represent. Not many of them are genuinely local people; they are career politicians who have climbed the greasy pole until they have been allocated a winnable seat. They are supposed to be the honourable member for Suchandsuchtown, but they possibly never heard of the place until they attended their selection meeting.

It seems to me that many of today’s MPs represent primarily themselves and their own ideas and careers, then the party to which they owe their elevation, and only as an afterthought the people who elected them. This does not necessarily make them bad people; many, I am sure, are honest, decent folk, doing what they believe to be best. But were their priorities not as I suggest above, you could not possibly have well over 400 Remainer MPs in a country where over 400 of 650 constituencies voted to leave the EU.

There. I arrived in the end at the issue which probably gave rise to your question. I tend to agree that hard cases make bad law, but the complete disconnect that has now arisen between representatives and represented is not, in my view, a sustainable situation.

I don’t think this is the same as saying that representative democracy has failed. In its relatively short history, it has done much to advance society. However, when citizens of the information age are still quoting an eighteenth-century, pre-democratic age political philosopher (Edmund Burke) in order to explain why parliament is not delivering what the electorate voted for, I suspect we have arrived at an era in which substantial reform is required for our system to continue (or perhaps recommence) effective functioning.

Back to Business

To purloin an apposite line of Shakespeare, “We are in Brexit stepped in so far that, should we wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o'er.”

I think Remainers still preserve the hope that all this unpleasantness could easily be put behind us if only we could hold a second referendum and vote, however narrowly, the opposite way. Well, we could try, but it would never work, for two reasons:

• The EU would be sure to demand guarantees that a humiliated UK would not seek to recover some self-esteem by obstructing their renewed efforts towards integration and a United States of Europe. Please remember that the Eurozone already caucus separately from the other members and can outvote them in Council. There are fewer and fewer areas of effective veto powers that the UK can use since the extension of qualified majority voting. Cameron’s deal, exempting the UK from ‘ever closer union’ is no longer on the table. I can’t see how the UK could expect to preserve its rebate, or its exceptional status in respect of the Euro and Schengen even into the medium term. And the next Eurozone crisis is surely on its way as the crippled economies of southern Europe drag like a sea anchor on the bloc’s economic growth.

• The EU is only too aware that the struggle for Brexit has entrenched bitter hostility to it in half the UK population, and they will expect UK politicians to exploit that at any and every opportunity. They will not be disappointed in that expectation. Today, as the government’s hapless efforts to negotiate Brexit have floundered, Labour has been able to win the support of disaffected Remainers without even committing itself to Remain. Does anyone seriously think that frustrated Leavers will not be equally easily rallied behind vigorous domestic opposition to the first infelicitous new EU policy that comes along? After Remain, a pro-EU government would be every bit as vulnerable to anti-EU sentiment in the polls as the present government is to Remainer sentiment. If the two-party system broke under the strain, we might even find parliament’s Remainer majority eroded away and replaced by Leavers. 

You can’t simply suppress an ambition as powerful as Brexit has become. You can’t go back and pretend it never happened. You can only suck it and see. Either it will succeed, and thus eventually reunite the nation behind it, or it will fail, and thus eventually reunite the nation behind a desire to rejoin.

In consequence, parliament now faces the same choices that they faced before it, and these choices will not have become any more palatable. A second referendum offers no long term solution, as explained above. May’s deal will still be awful and will still not be a Brexit deal. Calling an election will require a lot of turkeys to vote for Christmas.

No-Deal will still be the least bad option and, if we get started right after the break, we might even be ready for it by October.

The Charge Against The Short-sighted Brigade

(with apologies to Alfred, Lord Tennyson)

I

Half a week, half a month,

Half a year longer,

Holding back Brexit

   Stand the five hundred.

“Delay, Remain MPs!

Never No-Deal!” they say.

Careless of obloquy

   Stand the five hundred.

II

“Delay, Remain MPs!”

Is there a one can see

No-Deal is what we have

   Half the world over?

   Theirs just to make reply,

   Theirs not to reason why,

    If you can’t think, why try?.

Holding back Brexit

    It’s a pushover.

III

Boris to right of them,

Commies to left of them,

T May in front of them

    Argue and chunter;

Stormed at by Brexiteers,

Blindly the pitch they queer,

May as well save our breath,

This lot just sit and sneer

    Stubborn five hundred!

IV

Cliff edge and crashing out,

Hark how the rascals shout!

Their numbers give them clout,

Wrecking democracy, while

   All the world wonders.

Let ignorant Leavers whine!

What about Just-in-Time?

They got the answer wrong;

Rebellion’s not a crime.

   Our single chance squandered.

We might have our country back,

 But for five hundred.

V

Will their shame ever fade

Over this stand they’ve made?

   All the world wonders.

Britain has made its choice,

These few deny our voice!

   Ignoble five hundred!

Red Box

Those who have noted my Blog items and Quora answers on and around the subject of Brexit may not be surprised to find that I subscribe to Times reporter Matt Chorley’s daily ‘Red Box’ email from the political coal face.

Matt includes a daily ‘Have Your Say’ section, in which he invites readers to email him about a chosen topic. To my considerable surprise, this week he quoted my responses on consecutive days.

The first topic derived from a poll of Times readers which found David Cameron attracted most blame for the Brexit mess. In reply to the question ‘What would you say to David Cameron if you bumped into him?’ I apparently sent in the only email supportive of our Former PM. It was, of course, too long, so just the first two sentences merited quoting. Here’s the full version:

“David, you should ignore the Remainers who keep blaming you for Brexit. The fact is, you were the first PM in 40 years with the guts to ask whether The UK was happy to stay on the road to European Federalism. According to most of the political elite, it didn't matter whether the people agreed with this destination, just so long as no-one ever asked them. You may not have expected the result, but you had the grace to accept it. That's actually called democracy. It's just a pity you didn't stay on to see it through. Like you, your successor doesn't agree with Brexit. Unlike you, she doesn't understand it either.”

The second question, stemming from Donald Tusk’s colourful simile, was ‘Which Brexiteer would you consign to a special place in Hell, and why?’ Having learned my lesson the previous day, I kept this short.

“Since Remainers are 'holier than thou' and therefore expect to be consigned to Heaven, there are no Remainers in Hell. In which case Hell can't really be all that bad.”

Will life be better after Brexit?

Lunch in Strasbourg

The decision to leave the EU was taken long ago, yet the sort of questions which were asked back then are still being repeated. The answer is the same. Those who didn’t accept it back then won’t accept it now, because no significant new evidence is available. If they want proof and won’t do anything until they get proof, then sadly they will be part of the problem, not the solution.

Having more control over our national life, because important tools are back in our own hands, does not necessarily make things economically better. It depends upon us. Life after Brexit is going to be more what we make of it and less what we rely on others to make of it for us. It will require all our best efforts.

How many great discoveries were made by people who might have enjoyed a perfectly comfortable life without rocking the boat but wanted better? By contrast, how many achievements fell to grumblers who sat back and waited for those embarking on a new path to fail, so they could scoff and say ‘I told you so’?

I hope I’m wrong, but I get the feeling some people would rather see their country fail than admit the possibility that it could be made a success outside the EU.

A world economy growing faster than the EU is out there, but we have to get out and compete in it. Prosperity won’t be handed to us on a plate. Like most worthwhile investments it will require hard work, risk-taking and short term sacrifice. If a substantial proportion of us sit back and wait for others to prove they can deliver, we shall inevitably neglect a substantial proportion of the new opportunities we might have taken.

The proverbial Five (or Six) Ps work backwards as well as forwards; not only Yea-sayers but Nay-sayers influence the future.

Why does May not hold another referendum, as there seems to be no other way out of the Brexit mess?

First, let’s define our terms. What Brexit mess do you have in mind?

To be clear, Brexit itself is not a mess; departure from membership of a voluntary association of states cannot be other than a straightforward matter of giving due notice and letting that notice expire. Being outside the EU is perfectly possible: most countries are. Any attempt to punish a departing member would be clear evidence to the peoples of the EU that they had been lied to and membership was no longer voluntary. Moreover, if the benefits of membership are so few that departures can only be prevented by punishment, then the organisation itself is deeply corrupted and unfit for purpose.

For forty years the UK population were not consulted on the progressive losses of sovereignty involved in the transformation of the EEC into the EU and the latter’s acquisition of its own citizenship, currency and constitution. When the people were finally offered a choice, they voted to leave the EU. The question now is, shall their choice be honoured, as they were promised at the time of voting?

The UK’s pro-EU cabinet, which called the referendum to clear up Conservative Party problems, had not anticipated the possibility of a Leave vote. Despite being unprepared, our Remainer-dominated parliament nevertheless felt obliged to enshrine the referendum’s outcome in law. As a result, the UK is set to leave the EU, with or without a deal, on 29 March 2019. So far, so good.

However, many parliamentarians haven’t yet given up on the idea of thwarting the popular vote. They conceal this inveterate hostility by refusing to enact any specific withdrawal procedure. So now we have a political dichotomy, in effect a stand-off between a population who have given parliament a clear instruction and a parliament which will not accept it.

Claims of parliamentary sovereignty were all very well in the past when power was wrested from the hands of a tyrannical monarch; they’ll ring pretty hollow today if parliament tries to wrest sovereignty away from its own electors.

By your use of the words ‘no other way’, you seem to assume that a second referendum would be a way out of this impasse. In fact, let’s not mince our words, what you are suggesting is that parliament stands firm in its defiance of the popular vote and forces the people to vote again.

With due respect to other respondents who deny that a revolt of parliamentarians against people is a constitutional outrage, I hope you can see that the damage to UK democracy would be potentially irreparable, irrespective of the outcome.

The 2016 referendum produced a horribly-divided, tribal society. No arguments will persuade the vast majority on both sides who made up their minds long ago. Years later, some activists still find it impossible to restrain their bile and contempt for those whose only crime is holding a different point of view. Most people, I think, are just glad the horribly divisive campaign is over and wishing all the wrangling and bitterness was over too.

In the event of a re-run, all that can happen is that the old wounds are opened up again. One-time friends and neighbours who have just about learned to talk to each other once again (on neutral subjects) will be flung back into the cauldron of mutual abuse, now garnished with additional supplies of recrimination resulting from having to go through it all again.

Either the result will be confirmed, in which case the whole thing becomes a needless exercise in societal self-harm, or it would be reversed, in which case this socially-divisive issue will simply continue to fester until a third referendum can be called.

And you can be quite certain it would be called before very long. Another general election is due in 2022 and there’s mileage to be made from the politics of grievance. Look at the aftermath of the ‘once in a generation’ Scottish referendum. Look at the Remainer campaign to sabotage Brexit. This angst is the built-in curse of any referendum system.

In such an event, Leavers would correctly point out that Brexit wasn’t even attempted. The only thing demonstrated by the second referendum, they would say, was the power of vested interests and the political elite to drag our country back into the clutches of an organisation that has shown itself malign and vindictive. The parliament that acted as the agents of that treachery will be derided as a mere cypher, unworthy of either trust or respect. And from such a can of worms, who knows what unpleasantness may crawl out?

Partiality aside, consider for a moment. Someday, somehow, we have to return to being one society, not two tribes; not winners and losers but one people. Does anyone seriously suggest a second referendum is going to help us do this?

(This was my reply to a Quora question.)

Which would damage Britain more, Brexit or a second referendum?

When I was a child, I lived with my parents. They always did their best for me and I was never hungry or shabby. When I grew up I decided I needed to make a life for myself away from home. I met a girl and we married. In the early days of our marriage, we were poorer than I had been when I lived with my parents, but we stuck at it and worked through various difficulties until we achieved a comfortable lifestyle, very considerably better than my parents had enjoyed. And because my parents were good parents they backed me throughout this struggle and were delighted with the outcome.

Now, bearing in mind that your parents may not live as long as you, tell me which is more damaging, to endure through the early difficult years of independence in order to make a good life for yourself, or to give up at the first hardship and go back to your parents’ home where it’s safe and secure in the short run?

There are some unfortunate people who, through no fault of their own, do not have an option. There are some people who choose the second option. But if everyone chose the second option, society would collapse, wouldn’t it?

Let us please remember that the 2016 Referendum was the UK electorate’s first opportunity for forty years to make a choice on the direction taken by the EU.

As it happens, I had read the fine print and voted ‘No’ in 1975. However, I blame no-one who was at that time under the impression that the EEC stood for free trade and nothing more. It’s no good now pointing to old documents, you really had to live through that campaign to know how much pressure was put upon a public that had only a couple of year’s experience of life on the inside and still saw an exciting prospect.

But to all those who now claim that changed circumstances within a scant two years necessitate another plebiscite to confirm our departure, may I politely enquire how vigorously you campaigned for a vote on the loss of sovereignty entailed by the formation of the EU at Maastricht? Were you satisfied with the opt-outs negotiated by Major or did you consider the UK was being marginalised within a determinedly integrating organisation? Not a change in circumstances worth a vote, eh?

How upset were you when the EU constitution, on which we had been promised a vote, was re-badged as the Lisbon Treaty and pushed through regardless of rejection by other countries? Did you worry at all about the erosion of the veto and the rise of majority voting? Did you care when the Eurozone members began meeting on their own to form a common position to put before the European Council, where they collectively outvoted the non-members? More huge changes, but again not worth a vote?

If none of these things caused you sufficient disquiet to call for a further referendum, then I respectfully suggest it is disingenuous to call for one now, when Brexit has not even been implemented and the only new information to hand is that negotiations turned out to be more difficult than expected. In that context, I invite you to bear in mind that prominent Remainers have publicly urged the EU to be tough on the UK in order to assist their campaign to reverse the decision to Leave. In other words, your own team has made a significant contribution to the difficulties of which you now complain.

The electorate gets one choice in forty years, the people make their choice and you think you can campaign with impunity for that choice to be overturned before it is even carried out? Seriously? You think that democracy in the UK will not be dreadfully damaged in the process? Two hundred years after Peterloo, has the establishment truly learned so very little?

Have you taken note of polls showing the low regard in which politicians are already held compared to other groups? In 2016 the government pledged to implement what the people decided. That pledge has not yet been met. If it is not met, then do not expect a restoration of trust in the political system within a generation.

Tired old Propaganda

I studied economics at Oxford, taught it, helped introduce management science as a secondary school subject in Scotland and subsequently examined it.

However, there are considerably more eminent economists than me who support Brexit. Perhaps I might pray in aid the 2017 report by Patrick Minford, Professor of Economics at Cardiff University and Roger Bootle, Chairman of Capital Economics, Europe’s largest macroeconomics consultancy, among others. The group included six former economic advisers to government and eight university professors.

“Brexit could boost the UK economy by as much as £135 billion a year...it is time to abandon the gloomy forecasts of Project Fear and embrace Project Prosperity – the mounting evidence that quitting the protectionist EU will transform Britain’s prospects over the next decade.”

Now you may not agree with the distinguished authors of this report, but isn’t it about time to ditch the tired old propaganda campaign that Brexit is exclusively the province of the ignorant? Rational discussion is not aided by abusing those who don’t agree with you, nor by hysterical prophecies of cataclysm.

It simply is not the case that all the evidence points one way. As Spinoza pointed out, it depends on the colour of the glass through which you view it in the first place. In this case, also, there is a decision to be made on the balance of probabilities and of risk versus reward.

Even if majority opinion amongst certain groups did point one way it’s not much of a guarantee. I’ve been here before, being called a xenophobe and a fool almost two decades ago, when I was one of the relatively few economists who held that the UK should not join the Euro because it was unsoundly structured, would not work properly and would damage several European economies severely. Strangely enough, nowadays I find far more people who remember agreeing with me back then than I ever noticed at the time.

The wicked flee where no man pursueth

The Prime Minister’s latest Brexit proposal is already well on the way to Brexit In Name Only and, by the time Brussels has finished demanding even more concessions and the government has finished rolling over, the UK is likely to be in the limbo I have consistently described as the worst of all possible worlds.

Let us be clear: BRINO is not only worse than Brexit it is worse than Remain. The future envisaged by the Chequers proposals appears to be a UK permanently held hostage in the EU’s anteroom. We shall be obliged to accept all rules on goods etc. without any say in drawing them up. In practice, we shall have to implement the ECJ’s decisions on those rules. We shall lack the flexibility to foster innovation in new industries such as biotechnology, where we have a comparative advantage. We shall not be able to negotiate any goods trade deals with third parties that depart from EU rules; hence it seems unlikely that we shall be able to agree a deal with the USA, our largest single market. We shall be obliged to accept a permanent deficit with the EU in goods trade.

For the privilege of this absurdly disadvantageous arrangement, we shall pay the EU £37 billion pounds. By the end of the negotiations, I don’t doubt we shall also be paying annual fees too, so the point of making a divorce settlement payment at all escapes me utterly.

Meanwhile, Brussels will ensure that we cannot participate in any of the ongoing EU projects such as Galileo, though, in a magnanimous gesture, they will allow us to continue paying for them in our settlement bill.

Any sensible government would have held off triggering article 50 until it was sure that preparations for ‘no deal’ could be completed in two years. This government has allowed itself to be backed into a corner by assuming goodwill on the part of the EU, even when it was evident that none was forthcoming. Failure to plan for ‘no deal’ fatally undermined the UK negotiating position. The nearer the deadline approached without any plan for ‘no deal’, the more obvious it became in Brussels that the UK would take any (bad) deal rather than ‘no deal’.

The arrangement now proposed is so bad that one is tempted to suspect it was never the intention to allow Brexit actually to take place. If you had set out to secure the worst possible deal you could scarcely have done a better job.

I now suspect a second referendum was refused not because the establishment expected a different answer but because it feared the same answer. A confirmation of the public’s desire for Brexit would have made it that much harder to deliver the non-Brexit-dressed-up-as-Brexit which we now see is intended.

Naive ingenu that I am, I actually trusted the official government statement that the government would implement what the electorate decided. I should have known better. It was, after all, a promise made by politicians.

Truly, the wicked flee where no man pursueth. The pass defending UK democracy has been yielded without a struggle.

Why is Brexit taking so long?

Why is Brexit taking so long?

1. Appalled by the prospect of losing its second largest contributor, the EU bureaucracy is being as obstructive as possible. The objective is to extract from the UK as much money as possible for as long as possible whilst simultaneously persuading UK citizens that you cannot rush complicated negotiations and no daylight robbery is involved.

2. When a political revolution has been effected democratically, the necessary counter-revolution takes some time. The ruling establishment cannot just reverse the popular decision overnight; even the famously phlegmatic British might take umbrage at that. Therefore the establishment agree with Brussels that the process is fiendishly complicated and they try to achieve by delay what they could not achieve by persuasion. Their objective is to wear down the popular will simply by monotonous repetition of the same difficulties.

As evidence of this, notice the change that has come over the two negotiating principles enunciated by the PM. These began as:

a) Brexit means Brexit.

b) No deal is better than a bad deal.

So far as one can judge the present wording is:

c) Brexit means Remain in limbo indefinitely.

d) Any deal, even a rotten one, is better than no deal.

Anyone who has ever negotiated anything knows you must preserve the option of walking away. If your opponent knows you cannot or will not do that then you will either lose or the negotiations will go on for ever.

Either of which, by coincidence, suits Brussels (see point 1 above). The very idea of allowing them to decide when the UK has arrived at a satisfactory solution to the EU’s currently-contrived obstacles-in-chief would be derisory if it were not actually happening.

And by coincidence indefinite postponement is also what our establishment want (see point 2 above).

Therefore the answer to the question is, if you think you’re seeing delaying tactics you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Remain Campaign Is Really Quite A Pain

Unreconciled Remainers continue to campaign for further parliamentary votes on Brexit. They know parliament is, for historical party-political reasons, overwhelmingly dominated by Remainers and not representative of the popular will as demonstrated in the referendum. They hope MPs who stood for election in 2017 on a manifesto of implementing Brexit may yet renege.

By a series of scandals in recent years our parliamentarians have greatly lowered their standing in the eyes of the public. But things could get worse. Having themselves decided to put the Brexit issue to the people, if they now wrest back control because the people gave them the wrong answer they will damage parliament’s reputation and standing beyond recovery.

It’s easy to forget the roots of our democracy are shallow. The UK has not always been democratic; in fact we’re still in our first century of universal equal suffrage.

As it happens I myself, though quite well-stricken in years and despite having cast my vote on every occasion I was able, have never so much as helped elect a constituency MP. I share this distinction with many others, I’m sure, because the UK constitution does not require a majority vote to elect an MP or a government.

Since The Second World War, only the 2010-15 coalition government has ever achieved the degree of support at the polls achieved by ‘Leave’ in the 2016 referendum. Strangely enough the right of the other, inadequately-supported, governments to govern was not questioned. Yet the contempt expressed for the much more convincing Brexit vote recalls the horror with which the 19th century ruling elite responded to the first proposed expansions of the franchise.

Look, I taught philosophy for a couple of decades. I prided myself on being able to argue either side of any question, whichever was needed in order to counter the prejudices with which my students arrived in the classroom. My objective was to get them thinking rationally rather than simply asserting their viewpoint. Arguing for a side you don’t actually support is quite good practice in understanding other people.

Yet in respect of Brexit on Quora I’m constantly bombarded by belligerent, expletive-laden certainties of what is right for my country and wrong about my own views from people who admit not so much as a scintilla of personal doubt, let alone the possibility of a rational alternative. Disagreement is, it seems, simply unacceptable.

All I can say is, some people evidently possess the gifts of clairvoyance and prophecy. I don’t. I have to muddle along with an M.A. from Oxford University, the experience of working through a couple of U.N. General Assemblies and a few decades spent trying to make sense of economics. Maybe that doesn’t qualify me to form an opinion, but it seems to me not unreasonable that it should.

Any number of superficially-plausible reasons have been put forward to justify trying to overturn the referendum result, but in the end only one thing matters: such a precedent, once set, cannot be unset.

And the alternatives to democracy aren’t very nice.

Why has Brexit proven to be so divisive?

Referendums are relatively recent innovations in the UK political system and we’re not really used 
to them. They involve voters far more directly in political choices than do UK General Elections.

In the latter, because of our first past the post electoral system it is normal for the winning party to poll less than fifty percent of the vote; since the Second World War the only government backed by more than half the voters was the 2010-15 coalition and that involved two parties. Nevertheless, as long as a government can command a majority in the House of Commons no-one makes much of a fuss and it is allowed to enact radical policy changes such as nationalisation or privatisation, to change criminal and civil laws or indeed to sign foreign treaties such as the one which took the UK into the EEC in 1973.

Note that this acceptance of General Election results comes despite the fact that the majority of voters didn’t vote for the government, whereas in both the 1975 and 2016 EU referendums the majority of voters by definition did vote for the winning outcome.

Note also that all political parties can and regularly do make undeliverable promises and predictions during elections in an attempt to persuade voters to vote for them. To hear some of the post-referendum angst you would think no politician had ever misrepresented the facts before, whereas in fact it is the normal state of affairs and everybody knows it.

A General Election is a very blunt instrument, since countless issues may influence votes and campaigns are usually very diffuse affairs. A referendum by contrast focuses on a single issue which is itself resolved into a single yes/no question. It is a great deal easier to decide how to vote on a single issue than to balance up the various party policies with which you agree and disagree in order to decide which party overall is the best (or least evil). In spite of this no-one ever suggests it’s too difficult for the uneducated to work out how to vote in an election.

You perhaps begin to see that objections are made to the results of referendums which would rightly be considered absurd if made in the context of General Elections. Why is this? I suggest because emotions are much more thoroughly wound up by referendums.

The Scottish independence referendum was, for many who experienced it directly, a profoundly unpleasant and divisive process. It was, in the main, divisive because of the emotions that were in play, not because of disagreements about facts. However much we may rationalize our instinctive position, human beings are strongly driven by visceral loyalties. This quickly turns unlikely allies into ‘us’ while former friends may suddenly become ‘them’. When emotions are involved, rational dialogue flies out of the window and we may resort to strong language to describe people who disagree with us. This is reinforced by modern social media echo chambers in which we only talk to people who do agree with us, while the best we may manage with our opponents is to talk at them and shout louder and use more rude words if they don’t seem to listen. But in General and Scottish Elections there’s always a political choice available to the electorate between parties who do and don’t support independence. Not so with the EU.

By the 2016 EU Referendum, the electorate had been denied any say for over forty years as the EEC steadily morphed into the EU and the EU in turn began to transition towards federalism. All major UK parties supported EU membership. They mainly selected candidates who agreed with party policy; hence the House of Commons came to be dominated by those favouring membership. The UK government even signed a rebadged Lisbon Treaty without the promised referendum on the EU Constitution. In short, Eurosceptics never had a chance at any stage to record their objections to the changes in the EU. This built up a great deal of alienation.

So take the emotional and unusual environment of a referendum, heavily season with decades of denial of choice, mix well with issues of identity and democratic principles of self-government, throw in deliberate attempts to stir up emotions on all sides and don’t be surprised when you get bitter division. Naturally this division makes it much harder to accept the outcome of a referendum than the outcome of an election. Before you know it, the losers are demanding another one, just like Scotland.

I strongly believe that a European political class which had a better understanding of the people they governed could have avoided all this unpleasantness and found ways to head off the least desirable EU developments. But elites don’t tend to think that way.

Quora Question: Was Brexit a success or a failure?

Former European Emperor

I find it remarkable that so many consequences are already attributed to something that has not yet occurred. Let’s be clear. Effects follow causes, not vice versa. None of the current alleged consequences of Brexit are actually consequences of Brexit.

The debate, the vote, the negotiating process and all the attendant hullabaloo have their own consequences of course, but these are primarily down to political dogma and to good and bad expectations which remain to be tested by experience of reality. Even the post-vote depreciation of sterling was natural, given the hysterical forecasts of catastrophe should the result be ‘Leave’. Positive influences, such as trade agreements with third countries, are not yet allowed, so negative expectations at present have the field largely to themselves.

Even after the formal exit in 2019 and the transition period, it will be years before an impartial assessment can be made. Partisan assessments will of course be made much sooner. Indeed, as is only to be expected, Remainers anxious to be proved right are already seizing upon every bump in the road as evidence.

Sadly they themselves are creating bumps which might not otherwise have occurred. They encourage the EU to believe the UK may yet change course. Accordingly Brussels glibly offers a return to the fold whilst deliberately making exit as difficult as possible. Brussels has already undermined the EU nationals section of last month’s preliminary agreement.

Naturally Brussels wants us to stay. We are a major contributor and the Commission is resisting the budget cuts that ought to flow from reduced membership. The other members’ hearts are open but their wallets aren’t.

A cast-iron mandate

Nicola Sturgeon today claims she has a cast-iron mandate for another Scottish Independence referendum.

That mandate presumably dates from the 2016 Holyrood election, when her government lost overall control and became dependent on The Greens for a majority.

Yes, I know The Greens favour independence, but I'm inclined to wonder whether their voters had it top of their agenda when marking their crosses on the ballot paper. Presumably, if it had been their priority, these voters could just as easily have voted SNP.

Needless to say her mandate does not date from the 2014 referendum, where the nationalists lost by a 10% margin. At that time they claimed referendums were a 'once in a generation' event. It now appears that referendums will only cease once the SNP wins one, or alternatively when they are no longer maintained in power by The Greens.

Looking at the catastrophic mismanagement that ten years of SNP rule has brought to Scotland's economy and basic public services, we can well understand the need for another bout of tribalist shroud-trailing to distract the electorate. Nicola Sturgeon's own popularity is at last begin to flag too.

On the other hand the SNP has still not come up with an alternative plan for a national currency. Surely they won't try and run the busted flush of sharing the pound sterling for a second time?

Moreover the oil price on which the last projected independence budget relied has halved and it is now reckoned that an independent Scotland would have a fiscal crisis worse than that of Greece.

In the Middle Ages it was traditional for the Scots to invade northern England whenever the English were distracted by a European war, but reviving this opportunistic policy during the Brexit negotiations is doubly inappropriate.

Firstly it prevents Scottish voters having a clear idea of what relationship with the EU would be the alternative to independence. It still seems probable that Spanish and Belgian vetoes would be deployed to prevent Scottish membership either as a new member or a rump continuing member, so Scots would be voting for a pig in a poke on both sides of the ballot.

Secondly it complicates the position for UK and EU Brexit negotiators, neither of whom could be clear whether the UK government was negotiating for the whole island.

The truth is that the uncertainty caused by the Damocles sword hanging over the Scottish economy will deter inward investment until the threat of another referendum is removed.

And, perish the thought, should the separatists ever gain their hearts' desire, the outrage they claim to feel over being dragged out of the EU against their will is likely to be as nothing compared to the outrage of half the Scottish population dragged out of the UK against their will.

Just Slaying A Couple of Dragons

1. By far the biggest threat to the Scottish economy is Brexit. (Source: the SNP, in resonse to virtually every economic bad news story for the last six months).

FALSE. The EU accounts for 15% of Scottish trade. The rest of the UK accounts for more than 60%. Even if Brexit resulted in the complete destruction of Scotland's EU trade, and there's no obvious reason why it should, it would do less than a quarter of the damage that Scotland leaving the UK Single Market would do.

Probably the biggest threat to the Scottish economy at the moment is the perpetual political uncertainty engendered by the SNP's determination to threaten a second independence referendum at any conceivable opportunity. Unlike the Scottish government, foreign investors can do sums. They know an independent Scotland would be a lot poorer and no-one really wants to invest in a shrinking economy.

AND if that weren't bad enough, Scotland is now the most heavily-taxed part of the UK. We have a lower level of income at which you start paying higher rate income tax, a higher level of big business rates and a higher tax on purchase of more expensive houses. Sure. Come and invest. Come and live in Scotland all you high-fliers. We guarantee you'll pay for it.

2. There are many possible forms of Brexit. The Government has no mandate to take the UK out of the EU Single Market / Customs Union / Euratom etc. etc. (Source: anyone who voted Remain who can't accept the result of the referendum and is still trying to keep the UK subject to one or more EU institutions.)

FALSE. The mandate was quite simple. LEAVE THE EUROPEAN UNION. In spite of which the determination to keep the UK subject to one or more EU institutions, and especially the European Court of Justice, continues undiminished.

Will the Remoaners please explain how the UK can cling on to vestiges of EU membership without being subject to the ECJ's power to arbitrate on all disputes?

Or how we could remain in the customs union and still negotiate independent trade deals with non-EU governments? 

No? Didn't think so.

There. That's those dragons dead. (I don't think).

So what's a Customs Union when it's at home, eh?

Journalists who have suddenly discovered the term customs union and who seem to think it differs from the single market have taken to asking politicians whether we can remain in one but not the other.

For those who may be confused:

(1) A Free Trade Area is a number of countries which sell each other goods without imposing tariffs, quotas or other restrictions on such transactions.

(2) A Customs Union combines a Free Trade Area with a Common External Tariff, effectively discriminating in favour of other members and against non-members.

(3) The EU Single Market combines both of the above with a common regulatory and standards regime enforced by the European Court of Justice.

Not only is there no advantage to system (2) over system (1), it is disadvantageous because it prevents members doing separate, advantageous deals with non-members.

The reason for having (2) tends to be the price you have to pay to get (1), since various individual members may want protection against specific non-members or their products. Rather than a complicated mishmash of bilateral deals you end up with the same external tariff against all outsiders.

Therefore the question at issue is not 'Can we manage to stay in the Customs Union?' but 'Might we be forced to stay in the Customs Union as the price of keeping free trade with The EU?'

True, The EU is at present our largest trading partner, but it is also a sclerotic low-growth market with a moribund single currency permanently on the point of collapse, to which threat the only reply to date has been more and more debilitating austerity.

On top of this the single market regulations stifle innovation and investment in cutting-edge technologies which is the true remedy to stagnation.

The only thing we should want from The EU is free trade (in services as well as goods.) Having the government pay to get this (out of taxpayers' money) is futile; you might as well let the taxpayers pay tariffs directly.

Being cut off from the ability to strike deals with non-members defeats the whole objective of leaving the EU. It guarantees a worse position than we had before Brexit.

But as I've pointed out before, we already have free trade with the EU. We are not going to start a tariff war, since it's not in our interest. It's not in their interest either but they might still do it out of pique. Nobody would accuse the Present EU administration of acting sensibly. If and when they do raise tariffs, we decide how to respond.

Note to all those demanding a plan - You just read the only sensible plan. Until the EU decides what, if any, tariffs it will impose, NOTHING WHATSOEVER needs to be done or indeed can be done in response.