RICHARD NORTH

Richard A E North is a blogger, but a knowledgeable one and highly respected. He was a local government officer and has a PhD in public sector food surveillance. He worked as a research director at the European parliament, once sharing an office with a Mr N Farage. In 2004 he was a UKIP candidate in the European elections so clearly he is euro sceptic, but his blog is unremittingly critical of the government. There is a link to his blog (EUreferendum) on the side bar under My Blog List.

I confess to reading Mr North's blog daily because it contains a mass of useful detail which is helpful to any remainer. One might ask if he is so euro sceptic why he is utterly scathing about the government's handling of Brexit. The reason is that he knows how difficult the whole process is going to be and he has always argued we should go the the EFTA/EEA option for a good long period before leaving. His plan - called flexcit - can be seen HERE. He is mightily full of himself and I'm not always certain he is as good as he thinks but his blog is a useful reference.

What I didn't realise is that in 2015 he was very close to joining what was to become the Vote Leave campaign and was "in constant contact" with Dominic Cummings who eventually became campaign director, and MPs like Owen Patterson. You can see this in his post of 19th July 2017 (HERE). North was pushing his exit plan because he thought (wrongly as it turned out) that no one would be stupid enough to vote to leave the EU without a clear path. In fact 17,410,764 actually were. However, although presenting a plan was considered it was rejected because, "creating an exit plan that makes sense and which all reasonable people could unite around seems an almost insuperable task" in the words of Dominic Cummings. This was surprisingly prescient given that even now, fifteen months on, we still have no exit plan.

North is convinced Brexit is heading for the rocks and will be a catastrophe. In his July 19th post he says, "For us to deal with this, we have to make clear the consequences. This is not going to stop the disaster but, at least, we will know who to blame. That is vital. The failure of the process must not be seen as a result of Brexit – rather the blame must lie with the incompetence of government – the Tory government."

This is where we need to be pro active. We must make sure of the opposite - that BREXIT is seen to be the cause of the problem and that the Tories just made a bad situation worse. Personally, I don't think this will be hard. Most people will not be looking at the details but will be painfully aware of the consequences.