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Now The Brits Want To Change Their Mind About Brexit?

Posted on 6th February 2023

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There is a new report on The London Economic showing that the British public is now firmly in favour (61:39) of reversing Brexit. That is a larger majority than the winning party gets in most general elections.

I don't want to say "I told you so!", but I told you so.

It seems that the voting public has had enough of the the list of downsides keeping getting longer, and the benefits having largely failed to materialise.

I suspect it may be too late, with too many bridges having been burnt. At the very least, the UK may have to pay to rejoin, as they had to pay to leave.

In part, the whole Brexit debacle is a demonstration of what is wrong with modern government: governing by ideology as opposed to governing by facts and proven theory. This political sickness is not unique to Britain, but British history is full of drastic and expensive examples of this approach. Here are a few examples:

  • The changeover to comprehensive education. This was based on an unproven theory, which was not adequately tested before being applied across the whole nation in 1965. The human cost of this, and the resulting economic fallout, was enormous, and still blights the nation. In contrast, Germany still has a selective education system, and despite there being problems and occasional cases of unfairness, it works well overall.
  • The nationalisation of many major industries (coal, steel, railways, telecoms, etc.) and the later privatisation of those same industries, all based on ideology, and with no sound or tested underpinning theory.
  • The downgrading of the right to British citizenship for residents of Hong Kong, prior to handing the territory back to China, based on the unsound theory that the UK would be swamped with millions of Chinese immigrants and the ideology of "Britain for the British".
  • The introduction of professional managers and administrators, people with no background in medicine, in British healthcare, which continues to cause problems and adds to the financial overhead of hospitals. To a lesser extent, the same problem exists in education, although to nowhere near the extent as in the USA.
  • The introduction of poll tax, where ministers and civil servants imposed a completely unimplementable policy on local government, ignoring a wealth of objective advice to the contrary. What is less commonly appreciated is the tremendous cost of implementing the tax for two years and then scrapping it.

There are many more examples here.

What is wrong with governments insisting on thoroughly analysed theories, and properly testing those theories, before implementing them as new policies? Every other profession insists on this approach (although, of course, there is the nub of the problem: politicians are not professionals, but rather amateurs).

Of course, I do understand that, in the case of Brexit, there were (and still are) other factors at play. At root, Brexit was about power; about British politicians trying to claw back the power they had lost to Brussels. Hence the enormous quantity of propaganda, often trivially easy to debunk during the Brexit campaign, and even now during the aftermath as politicians attempt to justify their stand.

It seems clear to me that the biggest single problem with politics today is politicians. The last person you want in charge of government is anyone who wants the job.