Beliefs Are Like Underpants

Beliefs are like underpants.  Fine and necessary things.  But you need to change them from time to time.   The world is way more complicated than our brains, and we are inevitably wrong about a lot of things a lot of the time.  I have had to make some pretty radical changes in things I have believed over the years.  Reality has often failed to match my expectations of it that I have, ofen reluctantly, had to bring my head into line with what has happened outside of it.


So where have I been wrong about Brexit?   Well so far, on nearly everything. 

For a start I thought that the trend of opinion would be towards the status quo.  Leave started about 10% behind - I thought that with the campaigning skills of David Cameron it would be a question of how big the remain lead would be.   In fact I think I started with the intention of voting leave just to avoid it being to big a boost to his premiership.

I also thought that it was a long term decision and so we should ignore the short term effects.  Behind that belief was the assumption that leaving wasn't really that big a practical problem.  I am old enough to remember joining, and it didn't seem to cause any great disruption.  Most countries in the world aren't in the EU so being outside didn't seem like something that needed to be a crisis.

This one's a bit tricky to admit to.  I thought that it was quite likely that the result would be a lot more pro-EU in Scotland.  So I was worried that the relationship within the UK might be at risk.  I was rather more perceptive than most in that.  But I gave not one moment's thought to Northern Ireland.  It never crossed my mind for a moment that Brexit would create a land border with the EU.  This was especially the case because I did think through the consequences for the Dover and Dieppe crossings which are in my neck of the wood geographically.   I didn't like the idea of the border controls, which I can still remember, coming back into force.   I did actually go through the likely outcome and concluded that this would more or less guarantee that any Brexit that actually came into force would have to be a pretty soft one.  Nobody, I believed, would argue for a proposition that effectively gave the French the ability to bring the motorway system in the south east to a halt whenever they chose.

So my beliefs about Brexit have been just about as wrong as it is possible to be without actually being a Brexiter.

I can't really claim to have been particularly perceptive about Brexit.  And some of the things I have believed about it I have only changed when objective reality obliged me to do so often with some reluctance.  So far all the shifts I have had to make have been in the direction of being more opposed to Brexit.  Nothing has yet come to light that has made me think that maybe we are making a good move after all.

But it isn't really logical to assume that all my beliefs were wrong in one direction.  There could yet be something that comes to light that at least offsets some of the bad things.  On the whole I have a lot less confidence that I know anything at all worth knowing about the subject than the day I cast my vote 3 years ago.

I wonder if Brexit supporters are having the same doubts?  If I have had to make some shifts to my beliefs, a lot of these guys seem to have hired a removal van.  It is no longer enough to support having a more arms length relationship with the EU.  We've now got to leave precipitously on an arbitrary date without any kind of agreement in place. 

It looks to me much like they are completely trashing the Brexit brand.  I wonder how that belief will stand up to the passage of time?