Richard North (HERE) attended some sort of secret meeting with a former senior civil servant and leaders of industry and at one point asked the assembly how many had even skim-read an EU free trade agreement. Only one hand went up. It was the former civil servant. He said present ministers also do not read such things either. The point North was trying to make is that free trade agreements are complicated, take a long time to negotiate and are not really very good. He's a leaver by the way, but a realistic one.
In fact almost nobody does detail nowadays and this is something which has troubled me for a long time. We live in a complex world, and one getting more complex by the week. Yet paradoxically, people are less and less concerned with the details. There is more reading material available than at any point in history. But people are far more interested in giving their own instant reaction to almost anything and everything, usually on social media, than in reading long explanatory articles. I belong to several Facebook groups with thousands of members. If I post a link to an article with a sensational headline I get several hundred likes and plenty of comments. But post a slightly longer, thoughtful explanation of a complicated issue and you get nothing. This is the problem.
So we have a shallow, shaky and probably prejudiced understanding of many things but virtually zero knowledge of anything in detail. We don't know and we really don't want to know. We rely on others, normally the mainstream media, for bite sized chunks of information but in Brexit we have a topic so complex it's well beyond most journalists and even if it wasn't, a detailed article would be ignored in favour of a tweet by an ignoramus. This applies to captains of industry as well as Joe and Jane public.
So we are in the bizarre situation where almost no one understands the ramifications of all the many different options. I do not exclude myself from this although I confess I have downloaded and skim read CETA, the Canadian free trade deal so perhaps I'm not quite as bad.
However, the fact that details are ignored does not make them disappear. They usually come to the surface eventually, especially the important ones, to force themselves into the current reality.
I think this was true of Brexiteers during the campaign and afterwards. They didn't realise the extent of the Irish border problems or the Open Skies agreement or even the so-called divorce bill itself. They didn't know about many things because they didn't want to know. Their own narrow prejudice gave them absolute certainty. All of the many difficulties that are now manifest must give then pause for thought at the very least, if not serious concerns about whether Brexit can be delivered at all.
But as someone once said to me, hope is always the last thing to die and I think now the Brexiteers survive on hope alone. Hope that some way can be found out of the mess they have put us in. The general public are not yet aware of the details or the disaster awaiting them, but it cannot be too long before they are.
