Sunday, 31 March 2019

Bogged down on the 31st March 2019

Okay it is still Brexit : after 10am on Marr, I heard something so revealing from Jane Moore Sun columnist. She was arguing that if we had voted Remain no more chaos would have followed and that by voting Leave the same logic should have been. They were both the yes/no of a binary situation. And that my dear Leaver is where it is all SO wrong. When you remain you vote for the status quo and there de facto you have to know what it means for all the shortcomings. But when you vote leave for a new situation, that is bound to be a hugely different choice. In logic, entering an undefined future is bound to involve far more potential answers than staying in stasis. That is even before you enter the real world that the EU, a massive trading partner of ours was not going anywhere because we said Leave. It is called geography. This refusal to recognise the huge flaws in the project from the outset which Gisella Stewart acknowledged and then correctly blamed on Parliament for signing off the Tory project is why we are where we are: stuck. And if you are Leave please understand that Leave could never, can never and will never mean simply Leave, not unless you wish to be in the mid Atlantic. A huge can of worms was opened in that referendum and we both said then "we're not playing" and I am so glad we did not. To have seriously entertained Leave a large number of white papers which never existed should have been written. And even after the vote, before Article 50 was signed, the studies to say what Leaving would look like could have been done. I cannot comprehend the most basic of mistakes that one after another both Cameron and May made. It seems to me most unlikely the end result is a crash out because as I think Stewart made clear and if not her another contributor, people may have thought they lived in a direct democracy, but they do not, they live in a representative democracy and that was rather ignored. I have no idea how this will end but an election is increasingly being framed, the local canvassing is certainly happening. But how that will make sense without clear remain or leave parties I have no idea. British politics is actually utterly stuck. However the best thing to do is to be patient and not advocate anything precipitate for that route brings suffering. After all the economy and the jobs market seem to plough on.