Brexit Is Like Giving Up Smartphones

We could do without smartphones.  Everything they do can be done by somthing else.  It makes sense to use the phone as the conduit for a lot of services that really fit being in the palm of your hand.  But if we chose as a society to do without them nothing much would really change.   Once everyone had got rid of their devices, all the software had been rewritten and all the jobs that are currently created by the smartphone infrastructure redirected to alternative platforms, nothing much would be different.  We’d just have a very slightly less convenient life than we have, but not so you’d particularly notice. 


Brexit is a bit like that.   The EU is a very convenient and cost effective way of solving a lot of not particuarly exciting problems.  We would be worse off without it, but it doesn’t have to be a dramatic difference. 

But imagine that we decided to get rid of smartphones, but to do it in a fortnight.  That would cause a lot of disruption.  No doubt we’d survive but it would be a lot more costly and there would be some very real victims. 

This is the problem we have given ourselves with the way we are pursuing Brexit.  It wasn’t a great idea to begin with, but plenty of countries manage just fine outside the EU and Britain could do the same.   And there are a few plus points to being able to manage our own affairs in a way that suits us rather than having to fit into a larger community of nations.   But just as we can’t get rid of smartphones in a couple of weeks, we can’t disentangle ourselves from the EU in a couple of years. 

I think it is important to make the distinction.  Brexit is not a very good policy in principle, but it is an entirely workable one.  And it is one that a lot of people have got behind.  So if like me you want to stay in the EU you need to come up with convincing reasons why staying in or rejoining is beneficial. 

But leaving in a hurry isn’t a remotely practical proposition and it is going to cause an absolute shedload of uneccessary trouble and expense.  We should be coming up with a 10 year plan to get out.   In fact ideally the political parties should come up with their own plans and we can vote on them at then next general election.  That way we have many of the questions debated and a party can be held accountable for what it says and what it does.   Indeed, if a party decides to go to the country on a pro-EU programme that keeps us in the EU after all, well that is a choice we can make as voters.

The problem we have at the moment is that the pro-Brexit wing of the Conservative Party is determined to get us out in this parliament.  They obviously don’t imagine that the voters are going to stay in favour of Brexit for long and they want to get out while they still can.   This is going to cause one heck of a lot of trouble.  And yet the solution is so simple.  Revoke Article 50 and announce it will be invoked when we are ready - probably some time around 2025.  And then we need to use the time to work out what exactly we want to do about our relationship with Europe.