‘Humanity has produced few true visionaries. But it’s produced plenty of arseholes who thought they were visionaries.’ Photograph: Hannah McKay/Reuters
Andy Bodle here. Remember me?
It would be wrong to say we were close at university,
except in the strictly geometric sense. You were my neighbour on Staircase 9 in
Exeter College in 1991/2 – my fourth year, your first. We didn’t hang out much,
because you didn’t really hang out with anyone, but on the occasional Sundays you
would invite me into your room for a glass of port and a game of chess. I think
I managed a draw with you once.
But as this was the extent of our social
interaction, we didn’t exchange details when I graduated, and we lost touch.
So it came as quite a pleasant surprise when,
about 14 years ago, you turned up in my office as the guest speaker at our
morning meeting (I believe you were an adviser to Michael Gove as education
secretary at the time). We exchanged brief pleasantries and I think we might
even have mooted meeting for a drink one day. We didn’t.
It was a rather less pleasant surprise when, four
years after that, you appeared again, at the forefront of the insane clown
posse that was Vote Leave, the official campaign group advocating the UK’s exit
from the European Union. And to widespread surprise, you won.
In case you hadn’t guessed, that’s why I’m
reaching out after all this time.
Initially, I was angry – very, very angry, to the point that I found
out where you lived with the firm intention of knocking on your door and punching
you in the face. Nine years on, I’m still extremely angry – because my life is no less
ruined by Brexit, and the nation no less fucked – but since it’s neither healthy nor physiologically possible to sustain
that level of hatred for more than a few years, I’ve now calmed down enough to address you with
what I hope is some measure of restraint.
So here’s my question. Why? Why were you so
determined to drag the UK out of the EU?
Millions of businesses, millions of livelihoods, hundreds
of thousands of relationships, 4% of GDP, the fishing industry, the NHS, social
care, UK farming, household budgets, Jo Cox, Makram Ali, Duncan Keating, Arek
Jozwik, the freedom of movement of 68 million people across 30 countries, were
all acceptable casualties in the pursuit of what, exactly?
For most of the Brexit cabal, the answer
is not hard to fathom. They’re racists, they’re nostalgia-driven Thatcher loyalists,
they’re business leaders looking to slash costs by slashing workers’ rights, they’re
grifters, they’re short sellers, they’re Hayek/Friedman free-market loons,
they’re idiots.
You, though, as far as I’ve been able to
ascertain, are none of the above. You have no employees to strip rights from, no
CEO bonus to swell, no colossal hedge fund likely to be further inflated by
relaxed regulations, no willingness to spout populist bollocks born of a burning
desire to be in the public eye, and your college room was relatively light on
Nazi memorabilia.
You have offered us a few nuggets over the years,
most notably the arguments you put on buses and full-page newspaper adverts – £350m
a week for the NHS, Turkey joining, etc – but as half of us knew then and most
of us know now, they were bullshit.
There have also been some possible pointers in your
public statements, usually in evidence to various parliamentary committees, and
I’ll touch on those as they come up, but none of them really stand up to any
sort of scrutiny either.
There’s probably something buried in one of your interminable
screeds on Substack, but first, I don’t have enough time left on this earth to be
trawling through a quintillion words of vicious, poorly structured, self-aggrandizing
jabber, and second, I don’t see why I or anyone else should have to find out
why you made us poorer by parting with yet more cash.
So I wondered if, as a courtesy to an old
acquaintance, whether you might for once in your life, with minimal evasion,
divagation and tu quoque, provide a succinct and direct answer to my question?
I realise that a life spent on the extreme fringe
of rightwing politics, in the company of (by your own admission) charlatans,
fools and professional propagandists, will have caused irreparable damage to
your relationship with the truth. But for once in your life, Dom, please try to
include at least a smattering of it in your reply. Because I really, really
want to know why you did this.
One of your guiding principles seems to
be that the end justifies the means; that any amount of collateral damage is
acceptable in pursuit of your goals; that you can’t make an omelette without
breaking eggs. Which raises the question: how fucking big and delicious is this
omelette to merit the violent destruction of so many millions of eggs? And
where the fuck is it?*
This was originally intended to be a single
blogpost, but I don’t believe modern attention spans will relish everything I
have to say at once.
So over the coming weeks, I’ll list, in more or less reverse order, all the explanations I’ve been able to conceive of: the ideological, the cultural, the economic, the personal. Some are more plausible than others, but literally none of them, as far as I can tell, seems valid enough to justify the massive historic damage you’ve inflicted on your country.
*Sorry. I did warn you there was still some residual anger. But courtesy and diplomacy have never really been your thing anyway, have they?
Next time: did you back Brexit because you’re a Nazi?
CBAs may be a flawed and oversimplified way of looking at Brexit, but they’re still more than most Leave voters have bothered to do
You’re a business owner. An opportunity arises for expansion. The risks are daunting – but the potential boost to income is huge. How do you decide whether to proceed? The first thing any halfway competent company director will do in this situation is undertake a cost-benefit analysis.
Essentially, you note down all the anticipated dividends of the project, alongside all the costs, risks and drawbacks. Assign values to each dividend and cost, then add up both totals. If the figure in the first column is greater than the figure in the second, expansion is officially a Good Idea, and you should crack on. If the opposite is true, you can the plan.
The technique has two main weaknesses. First, benefits and costs can be hard to evaluate. How much is an hour of your time worth? What about stress? Environmental impact? Reputational damage to the company? Can you put any meaningful value on things like job satisfaction, or the feeling that you’ve made a positive difference to the world?
Second, the universe loves delivering nasty surprises. It’s impossible to factor in every eventuality, and even the best-informed predictions can be undone by twists of fate. What if demand for your product suddenly fizzles? What if interest rates shoot up immediately after you take out that huge loan? What if your product is implicated, however unfairly, in a national scandal?
But
while it might be an inexact science, taking any decision that may have
far-ranging consequences without some sort of attempt to estimate its chances
of success is downright irresponsible.
Hang on, you interject. Isn’t “cost-benefit analysis” just a fancy economese way of saying “making a list of pros and cons”? Superb observational skills, I reply. While the term comes from economics (coined by the French engineer Jules Dupuit in the 1840s, it didn’t catch on until the 1950s), it does bear some similarities to an operation that humans have been carrying out for millennia.
In fact, your brain is conducting CBAs all the time; it just does most of them – ones involving familiar situations – at a subconscious level. “Shall we go to work today?” your automatic, system 1 brain asks itself. “Uh, yeah, if we want to carry on putting food on the table.” “Shall I dodge this falling rock?” “Duh!”
Sometimes, though, when we find ourselves in novel situations, or ones where the arithmetic is not laughably simple, the reflective system 2 brain steps in.
Say you’re in a relationship, but things are getting a bit stale, so you’re umming and ahhing about ditching the boyf. Some in this predicament will go with their gut; others might talk to a friend or family member; still others will actually hunt down a pen and paper and tot up the pluses and minuses of giving poor Baz the heave-ho. The finished report might look something like this:
Like the business owner’s, Sammie’s calculations are bedevilled by uncertainty – what if it turns out she misses the action movies and tongue-clicking? What if Liam doesn’t fancy her after all? – but now there’s an extra complication. Whereas a businessperson can at least attempt to assign a monetary value to each cost and benefit in order to make them easier to compare, Sammie has no such option.
While the business assessment would read something like “New office = £100,000 per year, extra staff = £80,000 per year …”, Sammie’s is a mess of question marks. “No more Saturday nights of the lads just popping round for one beer” = ??, no more stupid fucking action movies = ?? …”
Since there are no objectively established units for “value”, all Sammie can do is compare the two lists and try to get a feel for which wins out.
The same problems beset CBAs in the public arena. And as the decisions of local councils, military commanders and national governments can affect millions, the need to properly evaluate the ramifications of any new operations or policies is all the greater. Let’s take two examples.
If
there were some way to “score” these quantities objectively, there would never
be any dispute over whether a particular policy was right or wrong. But the
awkward truth is, if you asked 100 people to rank the costs and benefits listed
above, you’d get 100 widely varying results. While some people attach great
importance to the environment, others are more concerned with personal liberty,
the economy, and their personal comfort and convenience.
It so happens that in the case of cars – powerful environmental movements notwithstanding – most countries have come to broadly similar conclusions. While mass motorised transport has many sizeable drawbacks, one of its benefits is considered so great that it outweighs all the negative considerations (although more and more countries are taking steps to minimise the downsides by encouraging the design of safer, more environmentally friendly vehicles, imposing speed limits, criminalising drink driving and using phones while driving, and so on).
Now for a more contentious and tragically topical issue.
Cost-benefit
analyses should not be one-shot deals. If the circumstances or risk factors
change, you need to run the scenario again. And this is one reason why policies
on gun controls across the modern world are so polarised.
What’s interesting about this case is that technological and social change have altered the calculus. When guns were first invented, they were inefficient and limited in their capacity for damage, capable of firing only single bullets. Today, of course, they are far more sophisticated, with some models able to fire 100 rounds a second. Even an amateur gunman can kill 10 people and injure 26 more in under 30 seconds.
Perhaps just as importantly, times have changed. When America first adopted its lax stance on gun laws, people lived in much smaller concentrations. The world was more lawless – state security was patchy, scrappy and corrupt – so it was more important for citizens to be able to defend themselves; and there were fewer people (in absolute terms, if nothing else) with serious mental illness or bitterness born of social isolation. Run the cost-benefit analysis in the southern states of the US in 1776, and you might well conclude that giving everyone the right to bear firearms was a reasonable proposition. Run it again today, and most people come to a very different conclusion.
The majority of civilised nations have decided, in light of these developments above, that the balance has shifted decisively. The benefits of arming the populace have dwindled and the risks have increased a thousandfold. Mass shootings in the UK and Australia, for example, prompted draconian clampdowns on gun ownership (and as a consequence, no mass shootings have happened there since). It’s only a hardcore of psychopaths in America who refuse point blank to rerun the cost-benefit analysis in 2019.
What about another highly controversial topic, immigration? Well, this post from last November was essentially one big cost-benefit analysis of freedom of movement, so I won’t repeat the arguments here. To summarise: minimal costs, lots of benefits.
(This
is to say nothing of the various laws beneficial to safety standards, workers’
rights and the environment that have been passed by the EU, which we cannot strictly
count as costs since they may theoretically survive Brexit. However, if
the party leading the UK out is the Conservatives, whose chief motivation for delivering
Brexit was precisely the removal of such “Brussels red tape”, you can kiss
those goodbye too.)
I’ve done my level best here to make an honest assessment. Despite asking Leavers for tangible upsides of Brexit well over a thousand times, I’ve rarely had any (rational) answers that aren’t covered in the seven points listed. I listed some of the looniest ones here. As for the cons, the evidence for all of them is only a Google search away. But for the exceptionally lazy, many are covered here and here.
There are very few ways you can conclude that column A outweighs column B. But first, let’s be honest: most people, when they voted on 23/6/16, were not aware of the sheer number of items in column B (not even most remainers). For this, much blame must be laid at the feet of the half-hearted and disjointed Remain campaign.
But
even now, 38 months later, there is still a sizeable rump of individuals who insist,
while generating biologically unfeasible amounts of spittle, that the rewards
of Brexit outweigh the costs. How is this possible?
One form
of mental gymnastics I regularly encounter is the wholesale dismissal of column
B as “Project Fear”. “Of course the European Medicines Agency won’t relocate,”
they babble, weeks after it has gone. “Of course there won’t be a hard border
in Ireland,” they froth, despite being unable to offer an alternative solution.
Another
is to attempt feebly to recast the costs as benefits in disguise: “We can just
train our own doctors … The bankers deserved punishment anyway … I preferred
it when you could only get raspberries in October.”
But probably the most common attempt at an argument is that you can’t put a price on sovereignty. No matter how numerous or how valuable the entries in column B, sovereignty trumps all. Half of leave voters over 65 said as much in a YouGov survey published in August 2017.
They might have had a point if Britain were actually shackled to a dictatorship and enjoyed no independence at all. But the fact is, the UK only ever pooled a small amount of its competences, in minor areas of law. And it’s not as if it even surrendered those completely; it still had a say – many would say a disproportionately large say – in the drawing up of that legislation, and a powerful veto.
The
UK government certainly didn’t think the country had forfeited much sovereignty
when it published its Brexit white paper in February 2017: “Whilst Parliament
has remained sovereign throughout our membership to the EU,” it said, “it
hasn’t always felt like that.”
And
judging by the polling carried out by Ipsos MORI every year, neither did you,
until 2016. If you did, it clearly wasn’t very high on your list of priorities.
No
Brexiter has yet been able to put their finger on any specific negative
outcomes of this partial sacrifice of sovereignty; few can name a single law passed
by the EU that even mildly inconveniences them. If you’re lucky, they might mumble
something about fishing (0.12% of the economy); but they don’t seem to
understand that the UK will still have neighbours. If we stop Europeans fishing
in “our” waters, they’ll retaliate – and most of the fish that Britons like to
eat swim far from British shores. Exporting fish (most of our native species
are more popular in other EU countries than they are here) will be harder. And
quotas will still need to be observed in order to prevent overfishing.
If sovereignty is really so important to people, why did we hear practically nothing about it before the referendum? Why were they not marching in the streets? The simple answer is, it wasn’t an issue. It’s a buzzword, a revisionist escape clause, a superficially respectable fig leaf for the true underlying drivers of Brexit: unfounded British exceptionalism and full-fat racism.
To anyone whose perception is unclouded by hatred and nostalgia, there’s only one way to interpret this cost-benefit analysis. Half the country made the correct call in 2016. Let’s hope we can persuade enough of the rest to stop chanting “Project Fear” before it becomes clear just how terrifyingly right we were.
As loyal reader (not a typo) will know, I’ve compiled a fair bit of material about Brexit and the rise of populism on this site. But there are of course plenty of others with more knowledge and a better work ethic than me, so there’s a veritable glut of information out there now. Only thing is, it’s all so … scattered. So this page will serve as a nexus for all the best articles, blog posts, tweets and other resources related to the ongoing clusterfuck.
It will of necessity be fairly skeletal to be begin with, as I wanted to get it up sooner rather than later, but I hope it will grow quickly – ideally with your help. Feel free to suggest any links you’ve found useful. (And don’t be upset if I don’t use them straight away. I don’t have as much time or energy to spend on this as I’d like.)
Brexit terminology explained: EEA/EFTA, non-tariff barriers, max fac, backstop, etc. Part of a huge reference resource
Full Fact: What proportion of UK laws are written by the EU (of which, just to remind you, the UK is a contributing member)? Answer: smaller than you think. There’s a ton more EU mythbusting on the same site.
European Law Monitor: did people really fall for Leave’s lies? All that matters is, enough of them did. (Leave campaign literature and post-ref polling information)
Fake thinktanks, data harvesting and targeted propaganda
Richard Corbett’s Long List of Leave Lies lists the fibs the Leave campaign told in order to cheat their way to victory, along with some impressive refutations
European Commission’s Euromyths: hundreds more examples of the above, generally peddled by the UK’s gutter press
The Bad Boys of Brexit: MEP Molly Scott Cato’s treasure trove of background info on the people who engineered the disaster: a cabal of chancers, shysters, hucksters and outright villains
We need to talk about Tufton Street: Details of the shadowy network of opaquely funded “thinkthanks” based at 55 Tufton Street – the Institute for Economic Affairs, Civitas, the Taxpayers’ Alliance et al – whose representatives, despite their complete lack of relevant qualifications and clear neoconservative agenda, are interviewed on political talkshows as “independent experts” on a daily basis
Why do American corporations want Brexit so badly? Read this 2014 essay on the Heritage Foundation website to find out. (Heritage is the US template upon which the UK “thinktanks” were built: climate change sceptics, anti-tax, anti-regulation, inexplicable charitable status, donors unknown – but agenda points squarely to big business)
Carole Cadwalladr’s Observer piece on the global data operation that drove Brexit, still one of the few efforts by mainstream media to get to grips with the problem
JJ Patrick’s Pfft-what-tinfoil-hat-bollocks-oh-no-it’s-suddenly-all-terrifyingly-true Alternative War, on the kleptocrat/populist disinformation masterplan. That’s a link to the Amazon page; there’s a good taster here
My bit on feeble populist arguments and how to rebut them. Basically, how to shoot down those dreary, witless souls who parrot slogans they’ve picked up from memes and the Daily Express – “They need us more than we need them”, “Millennium bug!” – but don’t really understand.
