The other day our friend Dr North wrote another blistering post (HERE) about the incompetence of politicians. This is specifically the present crop which he has referred to as 'stupid' and laments the last three years of being 'messed about by idiot MPs'. I agree with much of what he says but this was always one of my major concerns during the referendum: that by voting leave we would be putting ourselves into the hands of men and women totally incapable of governing anything.
It is as if he has recently woken up or undergone some sort of epiphany. On the day of the referendum (HERE) Dr North said this:
"To leave, therefore, is to open us new opportunities for ourselves as a nation – it is an investment in a future, a better future than can be achieved as members of the European Union. It is an expression of faith and confidence in ourselves".
I confess I know very little of the inside of politics, beyond what I read in the media. I've never stood for public office and I've met our MP three or four times at most and Brandon Lewis, Tory party chairman, once. I know my local councillor quite well but that's about it.
However, none of what I see, hear or know fills me with confidence or faith in 'ourselves'.
Mark Francois MP, for example, thinks he has the wherewithal to run the country and has backed himself at 200/1 to be the next Tory leader (HERE). The odds seem worryingly short to me. I don't know if it perhaps says more about his bookmaker's sanity than about Francois himself.
However, I do know about industry and it's been clear to me for years we aren't equipped for the modern world. Business is full of Mark Francois'. Incompetence is certainly not confined to Westminster, it is frequently the common thread that runs through entire sectors of the economy. One cannot visit similar British and continental European factories without being struck by the difference in attitude. We tend to be frivolous, lackadaisical, indifferent and not serious at all, while our competitors are wholeheartedly engaged, frighteningly industrious and determined to succeed by careful planning and long term investment.
As it is with industry, so it is with politics.
The referendum campaign only served to expose the incompetence of people like David Davis, Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Andrea Leadsom and plenty of others spouting utter nonsense while denigrating the experts for pointing out the flaws and holes in their arguments. If it wasn't for the seventeen million who were even dimmer, the leave side would have been laughed out of the country.
I shouldn't think there is anybody in the western world who thinks Brexit is going well. It's like watching colour blind monkeys trying to solve a Rubik's cube in a dimly lit room wearing dark glasses. You just know they aren't going to do it.
The Telegraph letters page this weekend has a number of missives about the government's lack of competence. It seems to me that this is what happened towards the end of Gordon Brown's tenure when people began to go beyond criticism of policy and started to question the basic competence of the government itself.
One letter says politicians can make mistakes and be forgiven (I'm not sure even this is true) but the voters will not forgive incompetence.
But actually, Mrs May has been extremely fortunate although it may not look like it from inside No 10 where they used to stumble from crisis to crisis but are now engaged in a sort of continuum of Brexit crises. Let's be honest, she has had only Brexit to contend with. For the rest of it things have been pretty benign. If we were to be hit with another crisis in the banking sector or the economy took a serious downturn or if the climate change protesters became more widespread I doubt the government could cope. The polls in Scotland show 49% now favour independence (HERE) - this could well be another dangerous moment in the making.
A new poll for The Guardian by Opinium (HERE) suggests a majority now think just holding the referendum in the first place was a mistake. We already know a majority think the decision reached in the referendum that was a mistake was also a mistake (HERE). The Eurobarometer this week (HERE) points to a massive 2:1 majority thinking EU membership has been good for us and by almost the same amount, people think we've benefited from it.
Rather than claims it was the EU holding us back, it now looks as if Brussels has been the only thing between us and meltdown for years.
Dr North has been toiling away on Brexit since 2004 when he first started his blog and at least he recognised it was an enormous challenge - but not once did he question whether or not we were up to it, or if we had the intellectual resources to manage such a process. His Flexcit plan was written as a way of showing how it could be done but is full of wishful thinking itself (HERE).
On the very day the referendum result was announced (HERE) this was his confident assertion:
"The majority of MPs are opposed to leaving the EU and so they absolutely will not support any moves to leave the EEA as well and so there are democratic safeguards in place to ensure extreme measures are not taken".
However, he is now excoriating in his criticism of MPs for delaying Brexit because they are trying to 'ensure extreme measures are not taken' through the 'democratic safeguards' he said were in place.
"In the meantime", he added, "nothing happens immediately, there is no need for alarm. Brexit is a process, not an event and we will see in due course that the propaganda spouted by the remain campaign was a gross distortion of the facts.
Was it propaganda? Or was the Remain campaign's warnings of ten years of uncertainty and chaos actually pretty close to the truth? Even perhaps an underestimate of it.
