Dedicated remainers may be surprised that someone like me who also voted to remain and feels strongly about our continued EU membership could ever see a benefit in Brexit. But at the risk of sounding more deranged than the Brexiteers, I think there may actually be a silver lining. To see it though we need to take the long view.
The build up to the 2016 referendum took at least twenty-five years. It went from small good-natured grumblings about losing our pounds and ounces to the final mad days of the referendum campaign where 75 million Turkish immigrants were already packing suitcases and on the way to Calais. The common thread, in my opinion, was an almost complete and wilful inability to understand how the EU works and even what it's for.
But on June 23rd last year the mendacious campaign of the leavers ended. The very next day Nigel Farage said the £350 million a week for the NHS was "a mistake". Turkey is certainly not going to join the EU. It is slowly becoming clear that many of the claims were wrong or misleading. And now, the government seems to be preparing the ground for immigration to continue at more or less the same level as before. Witness David Davis in the Baltic States a few weeks ago.
The tide of mendacity reached the high water line last June and is now ebbing. We are, in my opinion, entering a new campaign, one that we should have had before the vote. Two important changes have taken place. Firstly, there is much more realism now about what Brexit actually means. Loss of tariff free access to the single market and exiting the customs union for example. Leavers are becoming clearer in their aims and the huge costs involved in divorce. This process is going to continue in 2017-18. A lot of things are now being discussed in realistic detail that were only briefly touched on or never raised at all in the campaign.
Secondly, voters are beginning to see what it is they are getting for the payments made into the EU. The hundred and more EU agencies for example, that regulate everything from maritime and air safety to patent law and medicines on a Europe wide basis. When we quit we will either have to pay for continued access to them or have to create our own at our expense. They may also see that a lot of EU directives and regulations stem from other world organisations or from European industry and are simply administered by the EU on a continent wide basis for convenience, uniformity and lower cost. We will still have to comply, whatever our status. Brexit was far too complicated an issue for most people to understand but I think eventually, as the practical consequences become clear, they will.
We will still trade with Europe because it is the largest market and on our doorstep, but we will have to meet with regulations over which we have no control. And paradoxically, this may mean becoming more European, not less. Instead of the UK influencing standards to suit our market, it will be the European countries who will set them and over time many of the things we buy will become more European and less British.
The atmosphere, while still a bit raw, is noticeably calmer. We will soon be able to have the reasoned debate we should have had. The government, and in particular those who urged us to vote leave, will have to forget all those worthless slogans and carefully explain what we are going to lose as well as what we will gain. Of course we remainers think there is far more for us to lose with little or nothing to be gained. Leavers think the opposite. But as the evidence is gathered, the clear, unequivocal facts that were absent before the vote will have to be confronted.
I have been a sales engineer selling large and complex systems for most of my life. I know how difficult it is to defend the company you work for when you are seeking a second order from a customer. Like a Brexiteer, your competitor has no baggage; no past performance to defend and can say and offer whatever he likes. The customer only knows your products in practice. The competitor is offering a dream (Brexit) while you are selling perhaps a less than perfect or flawed reality (The EU). You know your own company (the EU) is not perfect but also that the competitor (Brexit) is much worse because you have visited their unhappy customers.
But we are now in the phase where the customer (the voter) is beginning to look in detail at the Brexiteers offering. They are being forced to go into detail and their proposal is starting to get an outline of reality as opposed to fantasy. And the economy will certainly take a hit from Brexit. Of that I am convinced. The two realities are beginning to come together and will eventually collide.
Whatever happens over the next few years we will eventually be back in the EU, this time for good. To think we can continue forever in some glorious isolation on the edge of Europe but not part of the EU, the EEA, EFTA or the customs union is not a rational or sustainable position for the UK.
