The missing question

It seems to me, Harry, you’re going a bit overboard in your reaction to one NPR piece. There have, in my view, been an awful lot of insidious pieces on NPR over the years. As to its insidious—as others might see them— pieces on Brexit, to my memory NPR, like most mainstream American media, has, I think, wavered between incredulity and outright hostility towards it, and I don’t recall them being particularly balanced.

Balanced, disinterested reports on Brexit and much else are no doubt eminently desirable, but we’re never likely to get them.

Boston is quite an outlier in lots of ways as a basically rural/small town place which experienced a big increase in Eastern European immigration over a short timescale because of the need for migrant labour in big Lincolnshire agribusinesses. Other places with lots of immigration were big cities (which voted Remain). Large Leave votes, otoh, tended to be in places where immigrants (or at least EU ones) live. The consequence of Brexit for that part of Lincolnshire will certainly be the mass departure of E Europeans for places where they are not treated like crap and where they are not paid in ever depreciating ££. Quite a lot of that agriculture will then become unviable as there will be nobody willing to pick the crops at for the wages necessary to make the crops competitive. (One remarkable feature of Brexit is that it simultaneously undermines UK food production and makes food imports more scarce and expensive!)

More evidence that the Trumpian/Johnson/ etc. zeitgeist is a worldwide sociopathic phenomenon. Reading this reminded me of how most farmers here in the US stand by Trump despite the fact that the tariffs are demonstrably harming them. I think some journalists believe that these kinds of interviews are instances of outrageous irrationality or the like; but in this zeitgeist it instead just spreads the madness.

The question he didn’t ask was how she justified wrecking other people’s businesses and the businesses that other people who are worse off than she is work for. [A]sk her to justify the costs she is trying to impose on them.

Frankly, as someone who generally feels he is on the same page as you Harry both in terms of political philosophy and political practice, I’m mystified that this is considered a gotcha of some sort. Yes, Brexit will wreck lives. But all significant political decisions have losers and winners, so can be said to wreck lives, that’s why they are political decisions and that’s why we (supposedly) follow a strict procedure to adjudicate between them. If Remain had won, some lives would have been wrecked. If Bernie Sanders wins the presidency in 2020, many lives and businesses will be wrecked (or so I hope, at least).

Now it may be argued that that more lives are wrecked by Leaving than by Remaining, or that the decision to leave is wrecking significantly more lives than usual political decisions, or that it is wrecking them for no obvious reason. Obviously, some people think so (myself, for instance) and others disagree (the relative majority of British voters that voted for the Brexit party in the European election, for instance). But I don’t think it helps pretending that Brexit is unique among political decisions in that a fraction of the electorate has made a choice that has a huge and sometimes devastating impact on other people: that happens every year in every democracy, very often with much smaller electoral support, and quite often with consequences which rival what is foreseen for a hard Brexit. Perhaps it shouldn’t, but it does.

okay, Brexit and the NHS.

1. Freedom of Movement from the EU has failed to meet recruitment needs for the NHS. The UK has for years recruited nurses from Asia and elsewhere. The UK has done this without offering From of Movement to everyone from these countries, and neither have The Phillipines or other Asian countries insisted on helping make our laws or demanded money from us. Post Brexit we will still be able to recruit medical staff from overseas, including the EU. FOM is like letting 50 people in and hoping one of them is a nurse.

2. What the UK hasn’t done is train its own people as doctors and nurses. When Dipper was a lad girls would leave school at 16 and enrol as nurses at the local hospital as trainee nurses. Then it became graduate only. There there was a restriction on places. Now there is a shortage. The UK is now investing in more training places for UK staff.

3. If we are talking about people dying, then the NHS regularly comes below European insurance-based systems with higher private provision in efficiency tables. So we could save lives by moving to more private provision of healthcare. Are you in favour?

just to bang on about this, what guarantees are you offering about jobs, GDP growth, public finances, real wage growth in return for my vote? Will you be prepared to commit to matching global GDP growth? And if you fail to meet those guarantees, how will I be indemnified?

We all know the answer. No guarantees, no indemnity, just a firm conviction that you are right and others are wrong. Well, we all think that. Including the lady in Boston.

I heard most of that story too. I suppose Lincolnshire likes having quaint businesses that can be run by yuppies, while preferring to house the industrial workforce required for efficient production elsewhere, in the cities. Perhaps Huntingdon is far enough away?

Z. I thought about writing a really long post with lots of wrinkles addressing the issue you raise here. Typically politicians – and actually vox pops – simply evade the idea that policies involve the trade offs that we agree they always involve. In this case she admitted there was a trade off. So. When you know that you are deliberately advocating a policy that you imply will harm other people you owe a justification. Often god justifications are to hand. I think tax rates should be raised on people like me even though that would harm us and that is just audited by the benefit that will be enjoyed by other people. And I can articulate why the benefit to others matters more than the host to people like me. I doubt I’d have been bothered by the absence of the question if she hadn’t elaborated on the harm it will do her business. But why didn’t the reporter think it was the obvious question to ask?

This whole prorogation business really is a travesty. Things were going so well…

“Apparently, according to this interpretation of UK culture, people should drink indoor (the pub?).”

Is that so strange? We’re (she’s) not talking about sophisticated open-air cafes where people sit at tables drinking discreetly from clean glasses and using the cafe’s urinals; the objection is to rowdy groups of men hanging round street corners drinking to insensibility industrial quantities of lager, or, worse, cheap cider, from multi-pack cans.

It’s not an accident. Boston, Massachusetts is named after Boston, Lincolnshire.

Tom. Binge & street drinking are part of UK culture and have been for my entire life. The idea that the Poles are responsible for pasty faced 20 something anglo-saxons getting ****faced on a Friday night is a bit of a stretch.

Basically, to find an unabashed Leave supporter they had to go to a rural area, off the usual grid.

‘Have to’ would suggest there’s a shortage of leave supporters in the cities, or that ‘leave voters’ feel they are unable to express their opinions in polite society. Neither of these things are true. There’s no shortage of Brexit bores even in London. She could go to my very prosperous and cosmopolitan town in the south and find plenty of people who’d cheerfully say exactly the same thing.

Harry,

First-time commenter and I apologize for such a trivial and off-the-main-topic question, but my curiosity has the better of me: Why is James Dyson repulsive?

I really don’t know. I think of him as the guy who makes very pricey gizmos, esp. vacuum cleaners. From the latter, you could say, therefore–and metaphorically–that he sucks. But why does he really? The Intertubes are not providing any answers here. Thanks.

@ Cian, Harry, “immigrants have introduced the practice of drinking on the street”, … “Binge & street drinking are part of UK culture”

In areas where large number of Eastern Europeans have come over to do manual work landlords have been buying houses up and converting all living rooms into bedrooms to get maximum occupancy. Hence there are no areas to socialise in the house, so people socialise outside.

On Susan’s rural areas point, I think Will Wilkinson is worth reading:

https://niskanencenter.org/blog/the-density-divide-urbanization-polarization-and-populist-backlash/

It is almost exactly 5 years since the publication of the Jay report into Child Sexual Exploitation in Rotherham. What we learned was that over a thousand girls and young women has been systematically sexually exploited including many clear criminal acts, that this had not happened away from the authorities but had happened in full view of the authorities, and the authorities had seen all this and failed to act to protect. Subsequently we have heard the same story in a number of similar towns.

So when you nice folks in nice cities start poking fun at stupid people in places you’d never visit, it carries with it some unfortunate resonances about what the authorities thought of those places, what they though were suitable outcomes for children in those places.

So, please, show some respect for people who haven’t had the good fortune to tread your particular path.

Reading the Wilkinson piece you’d never suspect that where people live (or whether they go to uni) had anything to do with how much money they have. I guess there was a gap in the market for a libertarian version of David Goodhart’s ‘somewhere vs anywhere’ schtick.

“Quite a lot of that agriculture will then become unviable as there will be nobody willing to pick the crops at for the wages necessary to make the crops competitive. (One remarkable feature of Brexit is that it simultaneously undermines UK food production and makes food imports more scarce and expensive!)”

If imports become more expensive then domestic production becomes more competitive. Even to the point that wages in food production might rise…..

I’m sympathetic to the losing side on the Brexit vote. I’d prefer Britain remained in the EU. All is all Britain is doing a far better job of coping with the loss to upstart populists who place their view of the future of Britain ahead of their own short-term needs and those of others than elites in America, who still can’t come to terms with the fact they lost control of the unwashed in 2016. Hard as it is to believe, some people do have the ability to ignore instructions their intellectual and moral superiors.

I’m especially grateful Harry has not been reduced to insulting those he disagrees with. Being sneered at for living and believing in a particular form of British life is part of what drove Brits to vote for Brexit in the first place. The latest poll supports proroguing parliament by a small margin, most do not want a delay, and most disapprove of civil disobedience to disrupt or delay the final Brexit deal or no deal. That’s where we stand.

That doesn’t mean the Boris can be trusted to turn out the lights without unscrewing all the newer light bulbs and slipping them in his pocket, and inserting duds in their place. This whole rebuilding Britain isn’t the sort of thing Boris is likely to do well. But that’s where we’re at. Getting out of the EU cleanly was the order of the day from the time the votes were counted. However, a significant subset of the elites saw things quite differently. An election lost to the unwashed could not by definition be a “real” election loss, so the “right” thing to do was ignore the result and obstruct Brexit in every way possible. The public has witnessed these efforts with mounting disgust and dismay. One good thing about being British, in theory anyway, is respecting the result of a loss. Be proud and humble in victory and defeat. Show respect to the vanquished and to the victor. Remain lost, most Brits know that. Brexit is going forward and perhaps know its time for the hold-outs to recognize the results of all that led up to their defeat.

History will not be kind to Cameron, Blair, and all those who managed to convince a significant subsection of the British populace that they had no place or future in their own country. Take a bow, if you feel you must, please. Just exit the stage, that’s what support for proroguing parliament means. Your work is done. The rest of us are all going to have to deal with the results of your incompetence and arrogance, thanks very much.

A few of us may even clap as you depart.

One of my earliest memories is of men getting lairy in the street on cheap lager in 1979. So spare me the racist blather about how it’s the fault of swarthy foreigners

I’m confused by Dipper’s remarks about Rotherham. There are and were “authorities” with the power to do things about child abuse in Rotherham. They are located in Rotherham, led by members elected by the people of Rotherham, and staffed largely by people living in Rotherham.

Ah, ph….. All this Blut und Boden stuff is bad enough in Germany, where you sort of expect it’ll never be entirely expunged, but in the UK it just looks like the last defense of upper class idiots and scoundrels. You genuinely think that a tosser like the PM, and an upper-class twit like Rees-Mogg represent true Britishness, and are therefore destiny’s proper children? I’d advise you not to step too close the collective suicide you’re so eager to assist in, lest some of it lap over onto your own wingtips.

SusanC @33: “I get the impression that Brexit is not going down at all well in Scotland.”

Well, impressions vary. The latest Opinion Poll, a few days ago, (YouGov, usually quite objective) gives support for the SNP at 41%. Given first-past-the-post, that translates into substantial majorities in Scotland. In an independence referendum where every vote counts, not so favourable.

Some London friends of mine have a cottage in Lincolnshire, which they have used for weekends and holidays for 40 years. They say that they are still seen as outsiders. Perhaps this has a bearing on the topic of Lincolnshire and foreigners. Some rural areas seem to me to have clear insider/outsider features. If either of your parents was not born in the village, you are not really ‘one of us’?

@ William Timberman

“and an upper-class twit like Rees-Mogg represent true Britishness …”

Do you think Brexit supporters hadn’t noticed the upper-class credentials of Johnson and Rees-Mogg? Seriously?

Yet again, in this world where politics has gone through the Looking glass, the working class look beyond someone’s background and identity to listen to what someone says, whereas the ‘left’ cannot get past someone’s background.

Let’s not start on the number of rich public school folks in the upper echelons of the left …

This is one of those things where there is what’s called ‘a fact of the matter.’

The Leave Campaign made quite a lot of factual claims to get people to vote Leave.

The Remain Campaign also did so.

We will eventually find out who was right. That moment is going to be extremely unsatisfying I suspect (1) people will do alternate history that allows them to blame their enemies (2) it will seem like rubbing people’s noses in it when they are suffering if the vote turns out as bad as it might (3) the goalposts will have moved very far and national amnesia will set in. (4) Things may suck enough so that ‘told you so’ is not going to be at all enjoyable. (It was definitely not enjoyable after the US-Iraq War).

The whole debate will be about the recent past, and what really happened, and everyone will be going crazy trying to get others to share their memories, and what should be clear will be made very muddy. That is very disorienting.

Am I wrong that the Leave Campaign moved the goalpost? The things they promised VERY clearly aren’t possible now so they are promising new things. They are even promising better things, which is kind of weird given the circumstances!

Already, what they claimed has been shown false in some important respects.

This makes me wonder if there’s some delusion involved. And perhaps this is why the NPR story is so frustrating. It is depressing when a reporter goes to a distant land like the UK–and gives a misleading slice of their reality. Sure, opaque cultures like. the UK are very hard to report on. But would it kill reporters to be a bit circumspect about whom they interview when trying to give an overall normative assessment of a political decision? All sorts of trouble starts when you just pick the first cab driver you see or whatever, as Thomas Friedman has inadvertently taught us.

One reason Brexit seems like a crock (to me, an American, who can only interpret this through their newspapers) is all the hand-waving. When trying to understand the situation, I read as much as I could. I watched the show on Netflix or wherever–which is apparently a serious distortion. I read the blog of the guy that show was about. And he seemed to be writing utopian fiction about what will happen when Brexit occurs. This made me notice that there’s a lot of that going on over there.

I looked and looked and looked in British newspapers for a specific reasons why Brexit would be significantly better for British people than staying in the EU and everything I found was (a) hand-waving promises about the future and British gumption and by-golly we’re innovators and these struggles will just make us stronger or (b) actual propaganda based on demonstrable lies or (c) very convoluted super arcane accounts of small details in the Treaty of Maastricht and various other kinds of labyrinthine logic based on historical analogies that I doubt anyone could make heads or tails of.

It’s not that anyone can prove Brexit to be certain catastrophe. We cannot prove anything about the future in the present. All the proof is about whether Brexit is a risk. People know what they have now. Remain was a bird in the hand. When getting rid of your bird in the hand you’re supposed to make sure that the birds are definitely IN the bush, and you can catch them, right?

That’s what it’s so hard to find evidence for. Already billions have apparently left the UK, much time has been spent, there is a massive social division that has been created entirely around this issue. Was it worth it? If all this is a good idea doesn’t that depend on whether there are two birds in the bush? The radar spotting the two birds is very faulty. To me, that suggests the risk is not worth it.

If that’s the case, there is the referendum result to fall back on. But if the vote is based on fantasy, and the risks are high, can we honestly blame people for wanting a do-over?

Every time I discussed the issue with a Brexiteer, they would offer facts about ‘British fishermen’ and whatnot. I would look it up and it would be an actual hoax–a planted story that was not accurate. Or they would talk about culture and identity and sovereignty –and one could not figure out why you all don’t still *have* those things. It’s not like you. all are actually French now. I don’t get how the French can handle the situation without panicking about French identity and sovereignty and you all cannot. Is it supposed to be that British are less like the French than the French are like the Germans? That’s doesn’t seem to be the case. Is the unbridgeable difference because you’re on an island? None of this makes sense to me, who is admittedly an outsider to your culture.

I admit that I am analogizing to the times when I’ve seen a lot of Americans lose their minds–like after 9/11- and noticing only the similarities. Clearly, I’m cherry-picking data based on my personal experience with American delusional group-think–something that happens pretty often. But what’s weird is that I find *the same data in this blog.* I cannot find anything except that wishful thinking or exaggeration of the harms of the situation under the EU and speculation about the future. And I swear I *really, really, really* tried.

Maybe some people just want Brexit. They cannot give convincing reasons. They’ve just got a gut feeling and that’s good enough for them. And likely that’s the reporting we will get from most news sources here because it’s so much easier to report what people want than to report on the reasonableness of the beliefs that make them want it.

@
”the missing question”

Why are there so many people (Brits) out there who want to ”teach others a lesson”?

A cause identified here is the practice of ‘hot bedding’ where someone works shifts and swaps their bed with someone else. Orwell mentions this in The Road to Wigan Pier and clearly regards it as degrading conditions. Now, apparently, the left regard this as a success for the EU.

Might this have something to do with the housing crisis caused by low wages, the housing bubble fueled by government policy and the ongoing sell-off of public housing? Just a thought…

Would you also consider an article that interviewed a remainer but not a Brexiteer, without asking them any of the questions Brexiteers would like to see them challenged with, to be “invidious”?

Yes, this sounds like an article that is only putting one side of a story. But given how many that only put the other side there have been, I suspect this of being an isolated demand for rigour.

“Pardon my language, but Brexit is truly fucking weird. Thousands, if not millions, of people around the world would literally risk their lives (and in many cases have) to get into the EU, to enjoy its collective democracy, freedoms, travel rights, health and safety standards, work and wealth opportunities, and welfare safety nets when times are hard.

The UK is doing the opposite. Like reverse economic migrants, the British Right is loading the boats with the country’s people and departing for, almost certainly, a poorer, more vulnerable, more chaotic future. For what? Beats me.”

Two hundred and some years ago we could have said the same thing about those Americans who wanted to leave the British Empire. No doubt some did a hundred years ago about those Irish who wanted to leave the UK.

Some groups of people want different things sometimes.

@55
”but Brexit is truly fucking weird. Thousands, if not millions, of people around the world would literally risk their lives (and in many cases have) to get into the EU.”

Ja – but there was this time when our British friends -(just like our fellow Americans) asked themselves:
”Who’s effing fault is it”? -(EVERY-thing!!)
And as people -(on Islands) really don’t like to blame themselves –
BUT!! – always the first ”OTHERS” which come in mind – Americans blamed ”Every Fureigner” – while our British Friends blamed the EU – which in their minds made much more sense – as blaming something ”buerocratic” as ”teh EU” doesn’t out you right away as somebody who just doesn’t like ”them Fureigners”.

Dipper @ 50, ph @ 52

We’ve been talking past each other here, haven’t we? As is our wont….

Dipper, the class system of Britain is weird enough without trying to map it onto the left/right topography of continental Europe. Where shall we begin? 1789? How about 1848? 1870? October 1917, maybe? Or 1956? 1968? What left exactly is this left that you’re hating on? And who? Tony Benn? Tony Blair? Jeremy Corbin? One of those things is not like the other, no? And honestly, Dipper, the idea that the careerist cat-herders of the EU bureaucracy are the second coming of Stalin is the kind of paranoiac fantasy that might prompt even a certifiably libertarian psychiatrist to start drawing up your commitment papers.

I think it likely that the gigantic interlinked economies which we’ve come to utterly and completely rely on, with all of the casual oppressions, exploitations and inequities they’ve raised to the level of inevitability, are the true mortal engines of our downfall. Left or right, we’ve already got plenty of reasons to suspect that they’re going to prove impervious to democracy. If so, neither closing the gates at night against foreigners nor railing against the kings across the water is gonna save us.

ph, I misjudged you, I think. If so, I’ll gladly reconsider. I still believe, though, that the venality of the British upper class, not Polish plumbers, is principally responsible for the inflamed parochialism of the good burghers of Boston. Many books, among them some very good ones, have been written about the toxic synergy between the need of an economic elite for cannon fodder in an era of mass politics, and the enforced ignorance of the working classes they invented to serve that need. No reason to do a less thorough job in the space available here, I think..

@ Faustusnotes.

I have been making it clear that the landlords removal of social areas and also beds is the thing that leads to people drinking outside. Comparisons of people drinking outside on rare events in the social calendar near places of entertainment is not the same as people drinking in streets on regular basis. I gave you an example of white English men drinking regularly in public and how that had been banned after complaints.

I realise that your inner angst requires me to be blaming foreigners, but I am not, so you have to invent it.

In 2009 when the government banned drinking alcohol on the tube the people of London famously had an all night cocktail party on the Tube trains.

Er there was no all night tube in 2009

ph:

the problem with your narrative is that Brexit wasn’t simply a case of the poor voting leave, and the well off voting remain. The core of Brexit are the tory party members from the shires, billionares like Murdoch headed by Farage a public school educated ex-commodities trader. Much of the desire to leave was driven by a 40 year propaganda campaign conducted by right wing, billionare owned, newspapers.

But that’s where we’re at. Getting out of the EU cleanly was the order of the day from the time the votes were counted. However, a significant subset of the elites saw things quite differently. An election lost to the unwashed could not by definition be a “real” election loss, so the “right” thing to do was ignore the result and obstruct Brexit in every way possible.

There is no ‘clean’ exit from the EU because of the border with Ireland. Also the idea that the UK could separate itself entirely from a huge trading block on it’s doorstep, or be anything other than an order taker once outside, was always a bizarre fantasy.

I took the story to be “will tories turn on Johnson?” (rather than say “are tories bad people?”) which is a question of import to people who feel they have some measure of control over what their government does (other than some spiritual benefit to be obtained by increasing worldwide karmic pressure against one’s opponents by voicing impotent condemnation of them). The interview as presented very effectively scotched that possibility.

I admit I don’t understand at all why you would believe NPR listeners are under the impression that Brexit is a good thing, or that they took the story as justifying the interviewee. I don’t think I’ve heard a single radio news story that wasn’t appalled by the chaos that’s bound to ensue, nor one that suggested “they’re changing the culture” is a reason to keep immigrants out.

“I admit I don’t understand at all why you would believe NPR listeners are under the impression that Brexit is a good thing”

I don’t believe that. I do think that NPR listeners don’t have a good understanding of what is happening. My evidence is that every informed person I meet tells me they don’t understand what’s going on.

On the “parallels” with the US or Ireland fighting to leave the British empire:

I feel strange to point this out, but the EU has a procedure to leave. It consists of you telling them that you want to leave, and they saying OK.

The British empire had a procedure that consisted of sending loads of soldiers to help you change your mind.

Brits are now unironically comparing these . I still can’t get over it.

@Barry #23

You’re joking, right? Hogarth’s “Gin Alley” suggests a rather different England …

Dipper is a malicious and useless commenter; his behaviour is perfectly described in Harry Frankfurt’s _On Bullshit_, and makes reading this blog’s comment section far more tedious than it would otherwise be. Ah, well.

One thing I wondered about, after all the months/years of foofaraw about the backstop, is why the UK government even *cares*. The Withdrawal Agreement is an agreement between nations like any other. So the UK can agree to it, and then later decide to abrogate it. At that later point, it is up to the EU to decide whether it wants to treat that as canceling the entire WA, or any further trade agreements for that matter. How can this be worse [from the point of view of people like BoJo and Rees-Mogg] than a no-deal Brexit? I just don’t get it.

Yes engels, sorry for the slip – the parties were until the last train. The idea even has its own Wikipedia entry but I guess I should probably assume its all johnny foreigner’s fault.

As eg notes, public drinking was a well-established behavior in the UK even in the 18th century, and this has always partly been blamed on a lack of suitable private spaces for partying. I know there was a large eastern European presence in London in the late 19th century, and I wonder if Dipper can turn that into sufficient evidence to blame 300 years of public intoxication in the UK on johnny foreigner?

@ Cian

“SMUGGLING IS A THING THAT HAPPENS A LOT BETWEEN COUNTRIES THAT HAVE DIFFERENT STANDARDS AND TAX REGIMES YOU IDIOT” Yes. It happens now in Ireland across the border due to differences in fuel duty, VAT etc. People try and get round regulations all the time, eg beef in cook-chill lasagne that is in fact horse etc etc. Smuggling is not tackled ‘at the border’ it is tackled elsewhere . What’s your point?

@ Collin Street “There’s no way of getting canada without breaking the gfa” Yawn. Which bit? Which clause does it break?

@ faustusnotes “public drinking was a well-established behavior in the UK even in the 18th century” all sorts of behaviours that were well established are not regarded as appropriate now.

@ Collin Street “The real lesson is that right-wingers are all thick.” as this is a reference to Brexit I assume what is really meant is all Brexiteers are thick. Smarter than David Deutsch are you? I doubt that’s true in this universe

Meanwhile in non-blogworthy non-Brexit-related news:
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/sep/02/benefits-freeze-leaves-a-third-of-claimants-with-100-to-live-on-a-month

Tim Worstall

“Sometimes people do stuff – like leaving a political construct – for reasons other than immediate economic gain or even at the cost of immediate economic loss.”

But the two examples you give don’t support you assertion.

The colonists who left the UK for America may primarily have been escaping religious persecution but they were also going to a new world where their economic prospects were ultimately better, with immeasurable tracts of ‘unowned’ land, weren’t they?

And the Irish diaspora was almost always a product of economic betterment, sometimes literally in the face of certain death otherwise.

Re Ireland, I assumed when you said “a century” you were not meaning to be precise, as I could not see why you should choose 1919 in particular as a year to make a point about Irish emigration.

09.01.19 at 5:55 pm

@ can “Also the idea that the UK could separate itself entirely from a huge trading block on it’s doorstep, or be anything other than an order taker once outside, was always a bizarre fantasy.”

Dipper: ” Canada seems to exist as a separate nation alongside its nearest partner and huge trading block. If you’re wondering what my preferred future is for the UK, think Canada. Works as the answer to most EU-related questions.”

I’m sill looking for an honest Brexiter, still hoping, dreaming, peering into the fog……

@Tim Worstall: “.. a goodly part of Ireland left the political organisation it was part of …”

That’s one way of putting it. Another way would be to say it fought a successful war to finally rid itself of the foreign power that had invaded and occupied some or all of its territory for 750 years and variously slaughtered, maltreated and/or impoverished its people.

To claim that this is somehow “usefully analogous to the UK leaving the EU” is to depart the realm of sanity.