Reply to post: "cold turkey removal of a country from a trading block"

IT systems still in limbo as UK.gov departments await Brexit policy – MPs

Milton

"cold turkey removal of a country from a trading block"

Voland's right hand makes a few good points.

The quality of "thinking" in UK politics is pitiful and certainly not improved by the fact that that lowest of of all life forms, the Career Politician, is "educated" with crap like PPE—the posh equivalent of a Tourism degree. People whose minds are already crippled by an affinity for politics need a scientific education to cure them, not more rubbish that reinforces their delusion that style and spin are all that matters while detail and substance are irrelevant. Imagine how much less shit would have spewed from the minds and mouths of a Boris, an Osborne or a Cameron if they'd had to get a decent degree in something hard like physics. The intellectual poverty, and often outright bankruptcy, of the Westminster clowns is doing terrible damage.

The comparison of Brexit consequences with what happened in 1990s easter Europe is also telling. I suspect that even those who are thoughtful and realistic about the disastrous effects of Brexit haven't really appreciated all the knock-on pitfalls and losses this country will experience.

You could perhaps argue that the UK will do better than those former Warsaw Pact nations, given that it has a much larger economy, already trades extensively overseas and, critically, isn't hampered by a command economy. That would seem logical. But it's also arguable that we have some very specific weaknesses that are going to make this crash especially catastrophic. These include: positively barbaric, Victorian-era levels of inequality, accompanied by the seeds of a US-style regressiveness of economic policy; a savaged social welfare system; crippling under-investment in police, schools, health and transport infrastructure; an increasingly dysfunctional democracy, "led" by manifest fools like May; a sewerpress which, with ever fewer exceptions (nod to The Guardian) has become a toxic swamp of propaganda and hate-filled populist screeching; and a population that ceases to value mature, rational, evidence-based decision-making.

Yes, Brexit is a symptom of the Age of Stupid, the sheer lazy ignorance of politicians and the tribal polarisation of culture leading to bigotry and hate: it arises from the loss of our ability to work together like thinking, rational, adults.

But those same weaknesses are also going to make the actuality of Brexit much, much worse than it needs to be. Brexit was always going to severely damage the UK, but the same forces that make it happen are actually also going to make the damage a lot more severe and enduring.

The angry, stupid children have smashed up the house: and they are precisely the wrong people to fix it.

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