Then it should be easy for you to provide your cite again. It’s something from the time of the referendum and from a reliable news source, not Twitter, right?
If you think that Leavers weren’t considering the short-term economic cost, please read post #1094.
If you think that expecting a positive long-term benefit from Brexit is “batty”, you’re wrong. You may disagree with the opinion - many people do including the Bank of England and several leading economists. However, hundreds of economists and business leaders do agree with that opinion. Here’s one example from The Guardian of all places:
Oh please. On threads in this board, a board dedicated to fighting ignorance, we still have people insisting that we cannot know that a no-deal brexit would be a catastrophe, that customs officers in France would just let British goods through because “who cares what Brussels thinks anyways”, and more! The leavers weren’t just badly misinformed then, they’re still badly misinformed now. There’s still a contingency of people who just insist that everything will be fine, that it won’t be difficult, that it will be good for the UK. In June 2018, long after the belief made any sense to keep, some 50% of Leavers thought that Brexit would be good for Britain’s economy, and only 17% thought it would be worse off (table 13, page 18)!
Think about that for a moment. Only slightly more than one in six leavers have cottoned on to the fact that Brexit is going to suck a whole awful lot for Britain’s economy.
And you want to say they knew this back in 2016?!
(Actaully, we don’t have to guess; the table has the data for September 2016, and it has remained disturbingly constant.)
I think you could find a handful of pseudo-serious-minded economists with plausible-sounding explanations for why Brexit might, in theory, have been a good idea three years ago before everything went to shit. Their opinions were very much not the consensus view nor the common-sense view (as, typically, abandoning a massive trade union is bad for the economy)
If you think that expecting a positive long-term benefit from Brexit is “batty”, you’re wrong.
[/quote]
I don’t think that’s as batty as the idea that it will generally be good for the economy. It almost certainly won’t be. And that’s what a lot of leavers believe… because that’s what’s sold to them. They weren’t sold this nuanced economic picture. They were sold “this is going to be all good all the time” by a bunch of fundamentally dishonest hacks, who have since went on to smear anyone who didn’t share their rosy-minded predictions as “project fear”. And those hacks are the people who have led and controlled this conversation at every level.
You posted two cites. The first one is to a post you made back in January. The second is to a 34 page document. But at least your first cite contains a reference to the second, offering where to look “(table 13, page 18)”. The table does indeed show that Brexiters expect Britian to be better off after Brexit. However, it says nothing about whether that expectation is long-term or short-term, and says nothing about short-term disruption.
So guess what? Many Brexiters are optimistic about Britain’s future after Brexit. Thanks for providing a poll, which required a fair amount of digging to get to, that shows what no one is disagreeing about.
Well, other than the Article 50 declaration and the withdrawal notifications, nothing did happen for two years after the referendum. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not.
If your point is that Gove was saying that Parliament would be careful and deliberative after a vote to Leave, and wouldn’t make the Article 50 declaration until Government was prepared for it, you’re right that that didn’t happen. However, I’m not sure if you can blame Gove for May’s government not following the plan he laid out in his speech. Was he even in May’s government when she became prime minister?
Not ‘for two years’ but ‘when the two years were up.’ A deadline that’s been extended multiple times (to April 12 now), so the chickens haven’t come home to roost yet. But his remarks translate into “nothing serious will happen on April 13 if nothing is done and the deadline isn’t extended.”
You cited him as a Leave advocate who’d done his homework (“Of the three people you listed, Michael Gove did do his homework, and frequently provided details of his vision for Leave, backed up by references and studies. Here’s his keynote speech from 19 April 2016 (PDF)”), and whatever else he may have said, he said without qualification that the passing of the two-year deadline after the invocation of Rule 50 would be a nonevent.
Feel free to check the context of the quote I pulled from his speech, but there ain’t nothing there to save you.
Then I believe we’re reading the quote differently.
To me that is Gove saying that Article 50 will not need to be triggered immediately. That Parliament and government would have time to plan for Article 50 before it was invoked. I believe my take on Gove meaning is reinforced by the paragraphs that follow the quote.
I’m not trying to imbue sainthood on Michael Gove or on the Conservatives’ execution of Brexit. The latter has been clearly flawed, and I personally find fault in May’s government for not adequately consulting Parliament. The question to me from Dan_ch, as I read it, was were any Brexiters doing any significant planning for Brexit after the referendum vote. My answer to that is yes, and Michael Gove is a Brexiter who was doing that forward planning.
Thank you for the links.
I have to say, my reaction after reading the first two was "is that it? That was the grand plan?" I mean, they make sense as an overall strategy overview (especially the "don't trigger Article 50 yet!" part...yeah, good advice), but the whole "logistics chain" critical for implementing the strategy seem to be missing completely.
To give one example from your first link:
My question is: how many negotiators specialized in international trade agreements does UK have? How many complex negotiations can UK sustain simultaneously? 2? 5? 10? If the answer is “5”, then it doesn’t matter that there’s 100 countries eager to have a trade deal with UK…it would still take 60 years to get a trade deal with all of them, assuming (optimistically) that it takes 3 years per country per deal. Unless you’re happy with the default WTO deal, but I don’t remember Leave arguing for this option during the campaign.
Mind you, I’m not saying this kind of details should be in the framework plan, but I would expect that Leave had a more consistent estimation of the effort needed. But apparently that’s not the case.
Gove’s paper is a little better, though it reads more than a campaign speech than a well-thought planning (to be fair, it was meant to be a speech, so there’s that). He makes a fair case for leaving EU based on sovereignty (yes, it’s true that being in EU means that member states cede part of their sovereignty), but he also seem to show a total lack of understanding for how other European countries would behave after Brexit. You’re for sure familiar with the following quotes (from your 3rd link):
He was totally wrong about all this. I mean, is not that the German government arm-twisted their car-making companies into reluctantly following the politicians, I actually remember that the car makers themselves said that the common market is more important to them that whatever exports they make to UK.
So I have to wonder: where did Gove got his information from? Did he had any contacts with unions or companies in the rest of Europe? Or was it only wishful thinking from his part?
But the most striking thing in your links is the Irish border. Or rather the complete lack of any mention of it. I would have guessed that even a cursory review of Brexit’s implications should have raised several red flags in the Leave camp. But they seemed completely unaware of it, and it turned out to be really, really, really important. How the hell did they manage to miss this huge issue that was right under their nose? Again, I’m not expecting them to put it on top of their Brexit manifesto (it was more Remain’s job to point it out, and IIRC Remain campaigners actually did so), but once Leave won the vote, I would have expected them to say “Yeah, the Irish border, tricky issue, but we thought about it and here’s what we gonna do to fix the problem: step 1, step 2…”. Yet, 3 years later they have no idea how to deal with it.
Other way round, as I see it. May has requested an extension to 30 June which the EU has rejected once before, and will reject again. They will counter-offer with whatever they want to offer. Whatever it is, May will take it. That’s sort of her thing.
Also, IMHO, I’m not sure what good any extension will do. Parliament is hopelessly split and cannot command a majority for anything. I don’t see this changing even with a new election and a new PM.
But, aren’t those the exact two options that Parliament most strongly opposed? I understand the frustration though. It’s almost surreal to think that a few dozen people are cloistered together in Europe after a long day (and week and month), and before they can go home they have to decide the economic fate of some 65 million people in the U.K. that could start in, let’s see, about 50 hours from now.
You’ve making it sound like the Big Bad EU is making decisions for the UK. Remember, if those 65 millions people had got their act together within the two years, and met their own self-imposed deadline, this wouldn’t be happening.