March 29 is looming. It's a Friday in case you were not aware. I suspect there will be Brexit parties. Or wakes. And for the record, the lights are unlikely to go off. At least not in mainland Britain. But they might in Northern Ireland. Because it is dependent on the Republic for power. And no one knows whether that power can be supplied after 11pm that evening.
Or rather, some experts doubt it can be. Some pragmatists think that despite that it will be, although they are not sure how. And most people in the UK as a whole don't give a damn.
I think the last have three reasons for thinking this. The first is that this will happen to someone else, so who cares?
The second is the belief that someone will sort this out. No one can be sure who, but someone will. Because they always do, whoever they are.
And the third is that the experts are wrong. That's because they always are, supposedly.
But suppose they aren't wrong? Suppose this time they are right.
And suppose that this time no-one will sort it out, because sorting things out requires someone to know the framework of rules within which they operate, and no one will know them any more.
And sure, I mentioned Northern Ireland, and to most people in the UK that is a remote and decidedly foreign country. But problems will be hitting the rest of the UK sometime soon after. Quite what they will be; who knows? I do not, precisely. But will there be gridlock in the event of no deal? The answer is yes. I can say that simply because no one will be sure what they can and can't do on either side of borders. And that will be enough to create the mess.
To this degree I am sure the ‘experts' are right.
And I am sure that prevailing assumption that someone will quickly sort it out is wrong.
Just as I am sure that most people will not have prepared for this eventuality.
So I do predict chaos. Not because anyone will want it. Or plan it. And some will try to prevent it. But it will happen anyway. Because chaos is what happens when the rules are suspended.
And in this case we are playing with people's lives. And their well-being. And their food. As well as their livelihoods.
I know it is assumed that the experts are wrong. On Brexit we all want to make that assumption. And past evidence suggests we should. Usually things turn out OK.
But no one has tried suspending all the rules before. And no one has, most especially, done so with no clue at all what to put in their place, for all practical purposes. This will go wrong. You don't have to be an expert to see that. You just have to understand that rules exist to prevent the chaotic scenario we are creating. That's all anyone needs to know. The rest follows.
It makes the closing scene of Blackadder seem positively optimistic to appreciate that.
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Spot on, jet politicians insist they know what the people where voting for in 2016.
Am not sure why Leavers aren’t told they’re anarchists more often, and in the worst sense, setting rules and treaties aside and replacing them with nothing more than sentiment: we’ll manage, we always have.
“So I do predict chaos. Not because anyone will want it. Or plan it. And some will try to prevent it. But it will happen anyway. Because chaos is what happens when the rules are suspended.”
This is actually the same as the Government’s subliminal message to the public; the fodder. Support or (if an MP) vote for the WA because this is what will happen if you don’t. The subliminal message includes “some will try to prevent it” ; namely the Government’s No Deal planning; carefully ‘designed’ to be too late to have any real effect on anything in the timeframe available (starting so late with this half-baked ‘planning’ is one of the more grotesque aspects of this calculated farce).
The Government wants to have its cake and eat it. The Government is in charge, and within its own far-fetched ideology both competent and virtuous, simply because it is Conservative (they still believe people will swallow this); but at the same time the message is, the consequences that flow from the PM’s actions have nothing to do with the Conservatives. It is the Government’s Brexit, but all the failures are solely the responsibility of the Remainers, Ireland or the EU.
Even now the Conservative Party (whatever hard-right husk is left) still believes that the public can be sold the proposition that the Conservative Party interest and the National Interest are precisely the same thing; at least sufficient to keep them in power, which is all that matters. This is what makes the May Government so cynically self-serving and utterly appalling.
Whatever happens from here, No Deal has been planned (accounted for, allowed for in forming policy), by the Conservative Party. The worst part of all this is that Brexit is not merely targeted at Britain (to believe that is both naive and politically myopic); Brexit is a political virus, targeted at slowly unpicking or degrading the great European political solution to the crises that destroyed Europe in two world wars – the European Union. Brexit is an invitation to Balkanise the whole of Europe by depriving it of its capacity to co-ordinate the interests of different self-determined states; to inspire a return to political laissez-faire, ‘balance of power politics’ in Europe, with Britain always using its weight solely in its own interest, to ensure that Britain always holds the critical balance (at least cost, and minimal direct commitment), and which ended so badly (a policy that can only ever be in the best interests of a single, ruthlessly self-absorbed country that is not part of the mainland – Britain); and which the suffering generations that preceded our own within Britain, thought or hoped had finally gone forever, in 1945; a solution born on the Continent, framed in 1948, formed in 1957, and which the British freely joined in 1973. The EU was the real Europe’s (including Britain), wise solution to the abject, catastrophic failures of the past.
Nobody knows where Brexit will end. Think about it.
It would be a good time to be setting up a national infrastructure bank then, for the UK or what remains of it. The HOL EU Committee appear to be supportive of the idea too (this is a rolled up Twitter thread of theirs) https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1090896216311894017.html
Like everything else, any post-Brexit scenario will be what we make of it. It may well be a time for reminding a recalcitrant government that we are many, and they are few.
This is my greatest concern. ‘Someone’ has to do ‘something’ to stop this madness.
But who is going to be that ‘someone’. Yvette Cooper tried last week but was defeated by factionalism. Do we have to get to the very cliff edge before reality and sense takes hold?
I think we may be over it before anything happens now
This is a brilliant piece and deserves a much wider audience. The working assumption of people who do not implement laws and regulations is that we will ‘muddle through’. This assumes that the people paid to implement rules and regulations will just stop doing so. I work in enforcement and I don’t think that they will just stop. When faced with uncertainty frontier officials are much more likely to just stop whatever is moving until more certainty is achieved. I have crossed more frontiers than I can now remember. I have worked with frontier officials all over the world. In my experience frontiers have two speeds: fast and very very slow. Enforcement personnel get criticised whatever they do, but the default position to minimise criticism is to slow down and follow the rules . Ultimately, in uncertain times, that is what any sensible person does, you do not have to be an expert to know this. Furthermore the post-Brexit uncertainty is likely to increase not decrease, this is because people will try to get around the rules, creating extra regulatory breaches and thus more work. Challenges in court will abstract officials and managers from the frontier. Ultimately businesses will just implement their plans to avoid the UK frontier, sooner rather than later. These plans will become the normal course of business. Ultimately, we will become irrelevant, my discussions with people in Europol and Eurojust indicate that we already are.
My ferry to France is booked for 26th March.
You get it
So do I
I say again, it’s at least arguable that all this is deliberate and knowingly done, and, aware they’re witnessing the last days of Neoliberalism, our parasitic class is gambling all on one throw of the dice and using Brexit to turn the clock back many centuries. They seek to make a Britain which is primitive and brutish, isolated from the rest of the world, a Hell they can reign in. Not good.
Now that is a sage expression of how the world really works. We see very little of such insight in the stupefying, anodyne banalities uttered about our post-Brexit world emanating from the official statements of the PM, the Government, and the ERG (is there any difference between them? Probably not, and closing to the edge of nothing in the Conservative calculus).