This blog post (HERE) by Peter North is interesting. He is a leaver but thinks the government's handling of Brexit "is poised to be a shambles" and says we have bought ourselves a decade of political and economic restructuring. This does not change his mind about Brexit in the least because he thinks it is in our long term political, cultural and constitutional interest. He does not believe it's an economic question at all.
This betrays the problem in some of the more intellectual leave thinking, that there is some higher reasoning behind Brexit, a sort of noble yearning to have national democratic institutions responding to the will of the people. I don't accept this for a second and for these reasons:
- Our government is responsible for education, infrastructure, health and social care and spending in the regions and other things. These are fundamental to people's well being and probably for a lot of their thinking on the Brexit vote. None are constrained in any way by the EU. Leaving will not make any difference whatsoever.
- Leave voters may rail against the 'undemocratic' EU but in practice what matters is the quality of the decision making, not which body makes them and in that we can see many EU countries enjoy better education, infrastructure, health care than we do. So who has the best decision making? We should learn and share with others.
- Money is central to solving most of the pressing problems that drove the Brexit vote and as the message that James Carville, Bill Clinton’s campaign manager during the 1992 US presidential election, famously had displayed on his desk “It’s the economy, stupid”. All else was said to pale beside it.
- Trade is crucial to an economy like ours that cannot feed itself and has no natural resources to sell to others. We need to sell in order to buy the things we want. Leaving the world's largest and richest trading block on our doorstep is not going to help the economy.
So, far from the economy being unimportant it's absolutely central and if Brexit, as I believe it will, impacts our ability to produce the government revenues needed to pay for and improve public services no amount of political, cultural and constitutional benefits are going to help. Unless the quality of decision making improves we won't see any benefits in or out of the EU. But out will certainly cut the money available.
