He certainly knows more than me, but I’ve never claimed to be an expert. I listen to the experts and use my own judgment and experience to decide which 'expert' to believe. In most subjects, the experts generally agree and I take that as being a useful pointer.
On Friday, North gave us a long explanation about the divorce bill. This followed some reporting by Tony Connelly at RTE, about the recently published consolidated EU accounts. The EU claim we owe €47.5 billion, which the U.K. government and pro Brexit press think is wrong. This is how he put it:
"RTÉ News "has learned - to quote its own pompous phrase – that the total liability will be €47.5 billion (for the second and third items), compared with UK's Office for Budget Responsibility prediction of €41.4 billion."
North says "Connelly has got the detail wrong – as he so often does" about one of Europe's most respected journalists. In his Friday post, North claimed, "The estimate in the EU's consolidated accounts is unlikely to change. But it is still an estimate. In truth, no one knows what the final bill will be, and there is means of knowing until all the original payments have been settled, which will not be for many years."
By Saturday he had changed his tune slightly:
"There can be no dispute here that the 2020 consolidated accounts set out the definitive figure, which represents the UK's liability. That is what the two parties have settled in the Withdrawal Agreement (Article 142, paragraph 5)."
It turns out that the €47.5 billion figure is definitive but it is the gross value from which we may get a rebate. If this sort of error sounds familiar, it’s because it is. The £350 million a week was also a gross figure which Vote Leave painted on the side of a bus and Cummings defended afterwards to the hilt.
This isn't the first time Dr North has accused the EU of being wrong only to discover they were right - on shellfish imports for one.
I read all this with interest, because it encapsulates the British attitude to so many things. It is Gove’s assertion that the British people have "had enough" of experts. This wasn’t new even at the time Gove said it in 2016. We have this view of the world that everything is actually very simple and experts only complicate things.
In Europe, at least among people I knew and worked with, they accepted the word of experts without question. You want to know about some obscure technical point, ask an expert. A mechanical designer would never assume he knows more than an electrical engineer about motor speed controllers. A commissioning engineer would never change something on a machine without checking with the designer, and so on. There is a hierarchy and experts are respected and listened to.
Whereas in this country we all think we are our own experts.
If you supply a machine with manual adjustments for something and tell the operator to make certain adjustments under specific conditions, they will do it - in Europe. In Britain, no. The operator, or more likely different operators, will make their own totally arbitrary and random choices and subject the machine to wild adjustments because they are their own experts.
Each operator starts his shift or day with a badly adjusted machine which he then spends the next eight hours fiddling with and making worse as successive erroneous adjustments fight against each other.
The customer then complains the machine ‘doesn’t work’ properly.
The best company I ever worked for (Italian) made packaging machines that had no manual adjustments between product and pack format changes, it was all done automatically under programme control using servo motors. Hence, the machine always worked as the ‘experts’ originally intended and there was very little trouble compared to cheaper, lesser machines where the British operators had free rein to muck it all up.
Dr North is the same, along with a lot of politicians. He thinks he is an expert in all things (the EU, food safety, the law, Brexit, etc) and writes his blog on this basis.
Brexit is partly the result of thinking life should be more simple and we don’t need experts or regulations to make stuff more productive, safer, more secure, cleaner, easier, or whatever the aim is.
I mention all this because this morning his topic is about taking back control from the EU - from the experts who have so often been proved right - to home grown, elected amateur politicians who have demonstrated that most of them have no idea what they're doing most of the time. North has been among the loudest critics over the choices made so far about Brexit for example and the pandemic. He now complains that control has been appropriated by the executive rather than parliament.
The truth is life is ever more complex and the future will need to be regulated by people who understand what they're doing - experts in other words - the scientists and engineers. It has always been so in Europe but we have somehow come to believe in this country we can opt out of listening to experts and accept the words of liars, populists and demagogues. We can't.
Finally, if you wanted a picture to show why the NI protocol and perhaps even Brexit itself is doomed to failure this is it:
When burning the flag of your neighbours and friends becomes “culture”. pic.twitter.com/TBHOkggo62
— John O’Brennan (@JohnOBrennan2) July 10, 2021
What this brings home to me is the beauty of the 'creative ambiguity' of the Good Friday Agreement. Everyone in NI could be what they wanted to be. There was no border between north and south or east and west - something that was only possible in the single market and the customs union.
Now there must be a border somewhere to greater or lesser impact, but still a border. And one half of the community is going to be aggrieved by that wherever the border finishes up.
