Can Brexit Britain Salvage Anything of Its Destroyed Future?

Brexit Was a Tale of Folly in Three Acts — And the Third Is Just Beginning

Image Credit: Tom H Calver

Here are some dramatic — almost chuckle-inducing numbers: just 9% of Brits now think Brexit was more of a success than a failure. LOL. That’s funny, in a morbid kind of way. They’re right to think that, but…have any lessons been learned? From this most catastrophic of mistakes? You see, Brexit is a tale of human folly in three acts, history will say. And Act III is about to begin. That’s not a good thing, if you know your Greek tragedy, because it’s when the vultures really come home to roost.

How did Britain get here? Let me tell the story, briefly, of Acts I and II of the Tragedy of Brexit.

Act I happened like this. Britain descended — was provoked, incited, goaded — into a mania. A nationalistic one. These things happen. Nations descend into moral panics all the time. America’s in one right about now, over LGBTQ kids and their teachers. What made Brexit different though was…that….the critics were silenced.

Let me be up front with you. I was a card-carrying critic of Brexit. As were many of my fellow economists, at least the good ones. To really understand “what the hell happened to Britain,” as more or less the entire world wonders, is to really have to know the following.

The critics issued dire warnings about what was to happen. Those warnings all came along the same lines, and went like this. Here was an island, which imported most of its economy. Worse, it imported most of its basics, from food to energy to the agents used to purify water. Breaking up with its largest trading partner? With no plan? And how was one to replace a relationship which provided frictionless trade for the basics a society needs most…with an entire continent…that produces the world’s finest stuff, from food to cars and on and on? That would be Europe, of course.

So we critics made a set of predictions. They went like this. The currency would tank. Inflation would skyrocket, since now all those imports were going to get more expensive, and plenty wouldn’t be available at all. That’d lead to shortages and rationing. Meanwhile, interest rates would soar, to try and control this inflation. That’d mean that, hit by the triple whammy of higher prices for basics, less availability of them, and higher prices for all that debt which was going to rise too, living standards would plummet. Fast and hard. They’d crater.

Now. These warnings were politicized. We critics were called “scaremongers” and “remoaners” and whatnot. We were painted as having a political agenda. But we didn’t. We were just trying to educate a nation about…wait for it…social science. Economics 101, in this case. Its effect on international relations, because of course, who’d want to do business or be friends with a nation in such foolish, self-inflicted trouble? Our warnings were not — let me emphasize — political. They were predictions about what was to unfold, in almost deterministic terms.

But they were politicized. That part matters, because we’re going to come back to the question: has Britain learned anything from this mess? Instead of being given anything like equal time, you know the story, or maybe you don’t. Criticism of Brexit wasn’t allowed. We critics were effectively blacklisted. An omertà developed, a code of silence. You can take me as a simple example, I’d appear regularly enough on British media. After I was critical of Brexit? Nada. Today, it’s emerged that figures in the BBC deliberately stifled criticism of Brexit. Think about that for a minute. A nation’s most foolish minds were stifling it’s best ones, and you don’t have to include me on that list if you don’t want to, by all means don’t, just include figures from Danny Blanchflower to Gordon Brown.

This omertà, this code of silence around Brexit, no criticism allowed, comrade!! — it allowed the moral panic to become something much, much worse. Act I: a moral panic developed, a frenzy of nationalism — our problems are those dirty foreigners’ fault! Those…those…Europeans!! Wait, said critics — they’re your doctors and nurses and everyday laborers. You need them. Without them, you’re going to set in motion a chain reaction of implosion. But we said it to…nobody…because even, by that time, the LOL, “left wing” Guardian was for Brexit. The moral panic was allowed to go all the way. Think about America: it got rid of Trump in four years. Its moral panic over LGBTQ kids and books and teachers hasn’t consumed the entire country, just the usual fanatical segments of it. But Brexit did consume…everything.