The lost Brexit decade
British self-harm and the crisis in the West
The feeling of crisis is so acute you can stick a pin in a newspaper and guarantee to find a story that makes the feeling worse. Over the weekend we had -
German car manufacturers beginning their deepest ever restructuring to stem “the bleeding” from an influx of Chinese rivals that could “permanently” shrink Europe’s largest economy.
In the UK, the former prime minister John Major describing how Brexit had left the economy 6–8% smaller, cost £100 billion in lost trade, and caused £40 billion in lost tax revenue annually.
And in Trump’s US? Where do you begin? Or, more to the point, where do you stop? What caught my eye in the sea of dross was Trump threatening a 100 percent tariff on Western countries that imposed new taxes on tech multinationals that are spreading violence and disorder.
There is no one better to talk about Chinese economic dominance, British self-harm and American malignancy than Mark Leonard, co-founder and director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, the first pan-European think tank.
He is the author of the newly released and depressingly topical Surviving Chaos: Geopolitics When the Rules Fail
You can watch us on YouTube above. Or listen on Spotify here
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Mark’s think-tank has done the work most of the mainstream media has ducked.
Its latest research shows that voters blame Brexit for negative effects on the cost of living (66%), the economy (65%), opportunities for young people (57%) and illegal immigration (56%). Strikingly, even 58% of those who voted for Brexit believe it made illegal immigration worse – which it did, by ending cooperation with our allies.
The British public deserve praise for telling truths politicians and the media would rather gloss over. Journalists still talk about pro-Brexit constituencies – even though majorities for Brexit barely exist today anywhere in the country.
Below are two explanations of the refusal of my world of journalism to hold Farage, Johnson, and the others who sold the public a false bill of goods in 2016 to account.
They are for subscribers. If you could consider supporting my journalism, a subscription works out at £1.15 ($1.40) a week.
The first piece shows how BBC News was bullied into acquiescence.
The second begins with a moment of comic hysteria when columnists for the Times, who had supported Brexit in 2016, recanted and described how they had learned to love big Brexit.
They looked as if they were imitating Chinese communists at show trial as they illustrated how Brexit has become the taboo no one on the right dare question.
The cult of Brexit on the British right
Times columnists confess their ideological errors about Brexit. Oh, my mistake, that should be Chinese students recite their lines from Mao’s “Little Red Book” at the height of the Cultural Revolution in 1967. (CREDIT WIKI COMMONS)
A black comedy from our age of extremes is being played out at the Times. If you want to understand why your taxes are so high, public services so terrible, and prospects so bleak it’s worth paying attention
The state of what was once the newspaper of the British establishment tells you all you need to know about the state of the nation.
In a wave of almost Maoist self-criticism, writers on the paper, who opposed Brexit in 2016, are stepping forward to confess to their deviations from the right-wing’s party line. They now accept that leaving the European Union was the correct course and repent their previous ideological errors.
It began with Juliet Samuel announcing that “I was a Remainer, but today, I would vote to stay out”. She had the self-knowledge to accept that her position would sound “deeply weird to most people” – and so it does – but she nevertheless believes that the EU’s bureaucracy stands in the way of a “vigorous state free to tear up the rules, champion Britain’s strengths and take risks”.
At no point did Samuel even discuss how, far from freeing the UK, leaving the European Union has accelerated our national decline by reducing GDP by 6% to 8%.
Nor did her colleagues.
Like social contagion spreading through a boarding school,
