Tuesday 23 May 2023

At last the country is getting behind Brexit - we hate it.

Old Farage has certainly put the cat among the pigeons with his admission the other day that "Brexit has failed."  Despite the words coming out of the mouth of Mr Brexit himself on live TV, there are plenty of commentators who are in denial. What’s happening is not unlike Soviet Russia under Mikhail Gorbachev in the late 1980s. When the leader of the Soviet Union more or less admitted that the whole communist ideology had been a seven-decade-long catalogue of failure, there were plenty of voices who argued that it hadn’t. It just needed a bit longer and capitalism was on the verge of collapse anyway. 

Or try to imagine if you can Captain Smith on The Titanic on 14 April 1912 telling the terrified passengers assembled on the bitterly cold and sloping deck that the ship isn’t sinking even as the prow has disappeared underwater.

This is now the extraordinary position of many leading Brexiteers who continue to argue that it hasn’t failed at all. Our old mate Robert Kimbell is one such man.

He has now gone full-on Trump. He says Brexit hasn’t failed but “It has been far less of a great success than it could have been by now.” In another time and place, he might have been that solitary figure waiting for the Titanic to arrive with his collar turned up on the quayside in New York harbour weeks after its scheduled date. I assume he would have said it hadn’t sunk, it just hadn’t floated as well as it could have done and will take a bit longer to arrive.

He tweeted (don't laugh):

And note he puts the blame on the “relentless eurofanatic MSM, and by Remainers now Rejoiners in the Commons and House of Lords.” I had to read the first part of that three times. The eurofanatic mainstream media?  Who can he be thinking of?

Meanwhile, in ConservativeHome, someone named Sarah Beament  writes that all the terrible economic news is plain wrong and in fact "the UK has performed better on all major economic indicators – GDP growth, wages and unemployment and inflation – than its European counterparts." 

Ms. Beament has apparently spent her career in The City advising on capital raising in the energy and power sector. If this is the level of her work it's little wonder we are paying the highest energy prices in Europe.

In reply to a tweet from David Campbell-Bannerman endorsing the piece, someone shows a parliamentary research briefing which makes it absolutely clear that what she claims is just not true.

I looked at the briefing which says, "The relatively strong rate of growth in 2022 is mostly a result of the continued recovery from pandemic-related weakness in early 2021. (GDP growth over the course of 2022 in the UK was essentially flat.)"

Lord Frost tweets an article by Harry Western (a pseudonym) published by Briefings for Britain about how a "further rash of press stories claiming terrible negative economic effects from Brexit" are "either misleading, exaggerated or plain false."

To hear Frost talk about 'objective reality' is really something isn't it?

However, the tide of history is about to engulf them all. YouGov has published their latest survey suggesting "Most Britons say Brexit has been ‘more of a failure’." The poll shows that the number of people saying the nation was right to vote to leave in 2016 has fallen to its lowest level, at 31%. Most Britons say Brexit was the wrong choice, at 56% (the joint highest, along with November 2022).


Taking out the don't knows we are at 64.3% saying Brexit was a mistake and 35.6% still thinking it was right. By the end of the year, I am confident we will be back to 1975 levels of support for the EU which to remind you was 67.2% to stay in against 32.7% to pull out.

Farage not only declared Brexit has failed but said, “Our politicians are about as useless as the commissioners in Brussels were. We have mismanaged this totally."

Faced with the evidence most people might begin to question their own beliefs. Perhaps Brexit is just a terrible idea?

The implication in some quarters is that failure is success. The ability to do things wrong in our own unique way is somehow a gift that only Brexit can deliver. To some people, this is indeed the meaning of sovereignty. They say being able to kick out politicians when things go wrong is what Brexit was all about. 

But if Brexit has delivered only failure (and all the evidence is that it has) one has to question if the economic hit is worth it. If our politicians are indeed no better or worse than those in Brussels and Strasbourg what is the point?

Finally, Steve Analyst posted a long thread in response to a BBC tweet about verifying things in the news and “investigating the real-world impact of mistruths.” He wants the BBC to investigate a paragraph in a book co-authored by Dr Richard North with Chris Booker. This is The Great Deception, all about the EU and in particular a claim that the British public was never told the EU was about monetary union.

Mr. Analyst (?) posts any number of references going right back to 1967 of Heath pointing out in public venues, including the House of Commons, that this is what the final destination of the EU would be. It's a remarkable thread.

When the idea of the euro was launched there was an attempt to show this as somehow being sprung on an unsuspecting public, yet nothing could be further from the truth. 

In fact, as we are now seeing, Brexit has been the real Great Deception.

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