Brexit - time to move on

After a Brexit debate of depressingly poor quality on both sides we now have a post-Brexit debate of depressingly poor quality on both sides.

Where the national debate needs to centre now is what sort of relationship with the EU we want when we leave.

Some people are indeed doing that, though rather too often in unhelpful terms like "hard Brexit or soft Brexit."

I say this because the President of the EU Council, Donald Tusk, has said that soft Brexit is not available and he may be right. The real question is whether, regardless of how nasty some of our former partners try to be - and that's not under our control - we build a global-facing open Britain, open to people, ideas and goods from both the EU and the rest of the world, or retreat into isolationism.

Other people, however, are still refighting the EU referendum campaign.

It is far, far too early to judge whether either side has been proved right in the arguments they used. Of course, every sane person already knew that the "Leave" side were indulging in an unrealistic fantasy when they suggested that if Britain left the EU it would save £350 million a week which could be spent on the NHS instead. But the fact that that money has not been made available to the NHS yet does not prove them wrong -though they were - because we have not left yet.

One prophecy which has been proved right is that the pound would drop sharply if there was a Brexit vote - what we don't know is to what extent a correction would have happened anyway and to what extent the pound will recover after we actually do leave if the UK economy then remains strong.

One prediction which has been proved wrong was the idea that there would be a second and much tougher budget if we left the EU. It was always far more likely that whoever was chancellor after June 2rth would respond to the expected post-Brexit shocks as Philip Hammond actually has, by postponing the date at which Britain would eliminate the public sector deficit.

But for the vast majority of arguments deployed on both sides it is far too early to say whether they were right or wrong given that Britain has not even formally begun the process of leaving the EU.

Comments

Jim said…
For months and months before the vote came Flexcit, it tells of pretty much the only viable solution, and the way forward in the event of a "leave" vote.

it really was thought about and discussed quite a lot, and I say now as I said months and months or so ago, its where they will go.

now you can go on and on with the charade if you like that the political "mainstream" debate was what people voted on and actually expected NHS Millions, or you can just accept the simple truth that parliament could not decide so put it to the real people, the debate actually happened on line and real people voted and remain lost (all be it by a small margin).

But that is what happened, no one really cared what Boris or indeed Cameron were saying, in fact when Cameron put out his "government case" letter to everyone people were more upset than ever.

You are 100% correct that its way too early to judge yet, as we have not even activated article 50, but that is the way we will go, and it will be the EEA/EFTA route if we can, if not the "Shadow EEA route"

All detailed quite clearly in Flexcit, FLEXible responce and ContInuous developmenT.

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