Can someone point me in the direction of a non-partisan expert about Brexit?
Every left-of-center source I can find says Brexit is the worst thing to happen to Europe since the Black Plague.
Every right-of-center source I can find says Brexit is the best thing to happen to England since winning World War II.
Does anyone know where I can find an (1) informed and (2) impartial summary of the pros and cons of Brexit?
I suspect you’ll not find what you are looking for because…
a) no-one knows what the long term effects would be for both parties when the UK stays or leaves. Pretty much everything you will read is speculation. We’ve never been here before. No-one has.
b) nope, that’s pretty much it.
You’ll have to come back in 20 years time and see what has happened and see if leaving was a good or bad thing, just as you would have to do in order to know whether staying in as a good or bad thing.
That’s like asking for non partisan expertise on climate change, or evolution. The best thing to do is get the feel of the consensus among credible experts, not the self-appointed online-degree types.
It won’t surprise you to learn I find that most experts agree Brexit is going to suck. Hard. They have more evidence on their side (and no, it’s not just ‘speculation’, it’s quite well informed data heavy forecasts based on known and reported agency activity in response to particular economic scenarios), while, to me, the pro Brexit camp relies much more on bare assertion and faith.
I will say that part of the uncertainty is that there’s many different kinds of Brexit. The way the Leave campaign went on last year we were going to some kind of unique EEA deal. Every Brexiter has their own conception of Brexit, and a different thing they want to prioritise. Some are prepared to let the economy sink if it means their shibboleth of sovereignty is attained, while others are happy for a form of Brexit where we maintain a porous border but massively deregulate, while others seek to heavily regulate. Makes Brexit a rather slippery eel.
It’s worse than that, because in 20 years time there will be nothing solid to compare Brexit with. Short of a massive depression/unprecedented economic boom, it will be all but impossible to judge whether Brexit was better or worse than staying in, because we won’t have stayed in. A lot of the difference between the Leave and Remain branches of the future will lie in decisions not taken, which are harder to see. It’s the investment that’s not made, or the regulations not enforced, that will have the impact and it’s a lot harder to measure those.
And this is only looking at the tangible outcomes. One theory of Brexit is that by returning powers to Britain we will strengthen our democracy by making people feel they have more control over those who govern them. How you would even start measuring whether that was true or not I have no idea. Dominic Cummings, who was one of the major architects of the Leave campaign, is on record as saying that his main reason for pushing for Brexit is to destroy the administrative institutions of government in the UK so they can be recreated in a form better suited to the challenges of modern life. Good luck measuring the success or failure of that.
That said, the reason we make predictions is that we know what to be surprised by. As Novelty Bobble says, there are a variety of visions of Brexit all making different predictions. Some (“the EU will jump to our whistle because of German car makers”) are already looking a little shopworn. Others, concerning trade deals, control on immigration etc. are still to be tested. But it will be fair to assess the outcome of Brexit against different visions for it, and see which panned out and which didn’t. This also holds for Remain predictions, which extend to serious and immediate recession post-Referendum (didn’t happen), to ditto post-actual Brexit, to the aforementioned gradual relative decline.
One recommendation I can make is that you should follow David Allen Green (Jack of Kent). He’s a law/public policy blogger who has been very strong on the actual Brexit process and what it indicates. He’s also both an Eu-skeptic and a BRexit-skeptic, so tends to be quite sober and MOR. He gives very detailed analysis of what each side is publishing, and tracks any changes over time. This is a good way of following who is succeeding in achieving their negotiating goals, and who is not.
(FWIW, my takeaway from his posts is that Brexit might have been achievable, but the decisions and actions of the British representatives have tended to be suboptimal and made the eventual outcome worse than it might otherwise have been.)
The Prime Minister doesn’t even know what she wants to accomplish. Her party is split and badly fractured. This Tory Party has both Ken Clarke and Jacob Rees-Mogg.
The Guardian and the New Statesman are both left of centre but are non paywalled and tend to have good coverage of the Brexit day to day occurrences.
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I’m a dedicated Guardianista and Remainer, but I don’t think this summary of what’s at stake and where we are is too biased to my point of view:
Imagine Spain around 1520 or Britian around 1890, they were vast empires that controlled massive quantities of land, and could coordinate the moving around of all of the various resources, between their holdings, for continued empowerment and glory.
And then different bits split off and they became just small, run of the mill, has-been countries.
But, at the same time, it’s not like the crime rate shot up or that famine set in or anything. The fact that Spain is no longer the ruler of a larger chunk of land doesn’t really matter to your average person and their daily life.
But their country is less cool. It does have less influence over global affairs. They’re not in the driving seat nor anywhere near the driving seat. They’re stuck dealing with all of the issues that others caused or forced them into.
Ultimately, the EU is a cooler, more powerful entity than the UK. Losing the UK makes the EU just a little bit weaker. Leaving the EU makes the UK a lot more weaker.
But weakness and strength and coolness have very small impacts on your average person’s life. Even if your country lags behind on technology or whatever, your average person adapts to the life around them, not the life that they have heard might exist in other countries, and they find satisfaction and dissatisfaction in it roughly equal to everyone else everywhere else.
I’m sufficiently certain that that’s just how reality works that, to a large extent, I feel like I can safely say that that’s what to expect from Bexit, despite not being an expert. But I am, admittedly, not a Brexit expert, so feel free to doubt this if it doesn’t seem like a reasonable expectation to you.
In my opinion the Leave side relied on innuendo, simplification and fake news. Whenever Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage are leading the case for something, then it’s well worth rejecting.
After months of discussion, we still can’t solve the problems of:
David Cameron expected to get a Remain result when he started the Referendum and there were no plans in case of a Leave vote.
As dalej42 said, the Government are hopelessly split - and Theresa May has never accomplished a significant policy change (let alone one as huge as this.)
So, you’re looking for an opinion on Brexit, but you want it to come from someone who doesn’t have an opinion on Brexit. Is that about right?
Nowadays, no, but the inherited social and economic structures from that time, and the assumptions and expectations entrenched in society did, however indirectly, lead to persistent social, economic and political tensions, instabilities, and ultimately the Civil War (which the political classes still haven’t totally come to terms with).
Likewise, the assumption of great power status and significance affects the sociopolitical atmosphere in the UK (or at least in the English political classes) - hence, I would argue, the assumption that leaving the EU would allow us to have everything both ways and on our terms, and that the rest of the world, particularly the US and the old Commonwealth, are just waiting for the word to offer us whatever trade terms we like. No-one knows for sure what the economic effects will be, but if it all goes tits-up, heaven only knows in what political direction the average not-so-well-off Leave voter in an already de-industrialised town will move.
No, he wants an informed and impartial opinion.
For example the Guardian newspaper is owned by a Trust, so doesn’t have to reflect the opinions of a proprietor.
The BBC is publicaly funded, so isn’t a Government mouthpiece.