Macron hit the nail on the head in this interview with CNBC (HERE). He said nobody explained the consequences of Brexit to the British people. How true - but what he doesn't know is the reason why that was. And I think I can help him. It's because they didn't know themselves! They didn't know because over the years they never bothered to read the details or to understand what the EU was actually for. At the head of this phalanx of ignorance is our own foreign secretary but he is certainly not alone. Almost every one of the leaders on both sides of the campaign were woefully ignorant about the consequences.
The press was also guilty. Virtually none of the journalists one reads really understands what Brexit means, or if they do, they are constrained by time or column space and simply can't explain it. A large section of the tabloid press is deliberately misleading either by accident or design. Inevitably then, the voting public are blissfully ignorant.
So if soldiers in the first world war were lions led by donkeys, what we are seeing in Brexit is donkeys leading donkeys.
We got a glimpse of this on BBC Newsnight last night where they had a panel of nine ordinary people from Sheffield, effectively a focus group on the progress of the talks so far. This was one of those excruciating programmes in which the BBC excel. Take a massively complex issue and ask people who know absolutely nothing, in some cases even less than that, and get them to discuss it and in the process give their unbelievably simplistic opinions.
It was the triumph of ignorance over enlightenment. Not one person knew anything. We were treated to one woman, a pensioner by the look of her, who thought it might be very painful but "hopefully it will be better in the end". She didn't explain how or why. One is simply lost for words. A younger Lib Dem voter, a leaver amazingly, blamed the current deadlock on Barnier. He spoke like someone who had never been outside Chesterfield in his entire life. It was like being a scientist observing some small woodland animals wrestling with a problem of quantum mechanics. Entertaining perhaps, but it didn't take the argument any further.
Until people are hit in the pocket or by failing public services like health and social care as the lack of money in the form of reduced government revenues because of Brexit, there won't be a dramatic shift.
