Is The Brexit Project Failing?

I didn't start out as particularly pro-Europe.  I was 12 when we joined and it all seemed like a good idea at the time.  There was a debate about it but it never really got me very excited one way or the other.  By 1983 when Labour ran on a programme of leaving the EU it struck me not so much wrong as anachronistic.  I was not at all sure it was a good idea, but it didn't seem all that big a deal.  I certainly didn't think through the implications.  After that Labour came back round to being pro-Europe and I thought it was back off the table for good.  Even when UKIP became prominent it didn't seem to me that leaving the EU was actually conceivable.  Apart from their headline policy I quite liked UKIP at first.  I thought the consensus at Westminster could do with a bit of a shake up.


So when to my great surprise David Cameron actually announced the referendum I hadn't really thought seriously about the issue at all.  In fact, I did ponder whether leaving the EU might be a good idea.  I like a good challenging project and maybe a big change would be a good idea.  So I thought it over.  But the trouble was that there wasn't any really compelling reason I could think of that made Britain outside the EU a better place than one in it.  And I could think of quite a few quite big benefits to staying in.  But even so, a part of me quite fancied the shear novelty of it.  I still find the "they said we were mad, but we showed them" aspect to Brexit quite attractive.

Well since the vote we've had the disbelief that we could do anything so stupid in plenty from abroad.  Perversely enough I have quite enjoyed that bit.  The thing that bothers me is that we really aren't showing them.  The lack of a plan was as big a shock to me as the vote itself.  With the exception of the Bank of England, to whom I think we all owe a lot, nobody had the faintest idea what to do next.  I had assumed that at the very least there would be controls on the outflow of capital from the UK.  I was imagining that people would not be able to take more than a certain amount of money with them on trips abroad for example.  The status of EU residents in the UK should have been announced immediately.  And so on.

Well as we now know no such plan existed and although we did get a government quicker than we might have done, we have had to have a new team in place to supervise the initial stages of the exit.  The psychology has been terrible, and speaking personally it has prevented me from committing to actually believing we have a future outside the EU.  Within 48 hours of the vote I had concluded that we had to rejoin.  Since then every twist and turn of events has confirmed that opinion.

I'm just one bloke of course.  I don't know what is going on in other people's heads.  But there is now a second poll that indicates more people regret voting to leave than the size of leave's majority.  The Brexit project looks as shambolic now as it did in the first week.  It is now past the point where there is any chance of it being perceived as anything other than an ad hoc bodge.  The big news at the weekend was that banks are planning to start relocating staff to the continent next year.

One of the things about Brexit I found most appealing was that it could be a chance to rebalance the economy away from an over dependence on financial services and back to manufacturing.  Well there is a world of difference between building up an efficient and competitive business sector that can provide a way of making a living to simply pissing off the people who are currently paying the bills.  As I say, if Brexit was to work it had to be a project not a howl of rage.  I think it has now got past the stage where it could have been a successful project.  It is a failed project.  The sooner we cancel it the better.