If Brexit has taught me nothing else, it has exposed a shocking lack of understanding on the part of our ruling political class and opinion formers in the press about how the British economy compares with its European counterparts, and soon-to-be competitors. Like many drivers and computer operators, they exercise some loose control over the machine but have only a vague and sketchy idea of how the engine or central processor actually works.
The intellectual poverty of our politicians is a regular topic of conversation down at our village pub and André Spicer, a professor of organisational behaviour at the Cass Business School, captures this perfectly in an article for The Guardian (HERE). He says there is one thing our leaders excel at and that is creating massive blunders. He explains the first step in getting to where we are today is to:
"...take a good helping of people with an over-inflated sense of
their own abilities. They should think their experiences in sectors such
as consultancy, banking or the law apply perfectly to all other areas
of human endeavour. If you are lucky, you will find they also have
stubborn ideas about how the world should be which no amount of evidence
will move. This will mean they will think the world should be forced to
fit their idealised model of it".
And we are indeed 'lucky'. Our leaders do seem congenitally unable to accept the facts in front of them, like Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau in A Shot In The Dark, faced with mounting evidence against Maria Gambrelli, simply unable to draw the obvious conclusion. Michael Gove, has made us a byword for idiocy when he told the world we had 'had enough of experts'. This actually marked him out as a special talent worthy of a cabinet post. In any other country he would have vanished from the public eye but they don't even do shame do they?
Our poor industrial performance, in decline for a century or more
relative to our close competitors, is put down to excessive EU
regulations even though the decline has been going on for far longer
than our membership and was actually arrested after we joined the EU.
There is an irrational and perverse school of Brexit thought that it is
only the UK's well hidden world-class industry which faces these
regulatory headwinds or that they are somehow deviously arranged to
disadvantage us even when we were actively involved in designing them.
We desperately need politicians with some intellectual stature and a good dose of realism. If we had had that in 2015, there probably wouldn't have been Brexit at all.
But looking at the present parliamentary cohort I really can't see where they would come from.
