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So how about we stop listening to jumped-up backbenchers, cranks and conspiracy nuts, and start listening to our allies, experts, our actual government and independent regulatory bodies? The latter hold an enormous influence over our future, democracy, prosperity and security, the former do not.
Perhaps we are all idiots, I just happen to like sensible idiots better.
Presumably those would include the same independent bodies many of which receive millions, or tens of millions, of Euros funding from the EU?
The same independent bodies, by the way, all of which use similar economic models all of which are modelling exit ramifications based on assumptions of effects, where the assumptions have absolutely no basis in historical data because a situation like an economy the size of the UK has never left a political union like the EU.
Or would it be the same independent body chaired by a former French finance minister? And would that be the same France that, if we leave, is going to find itself facing a substantial increase in contributions, or an EU having to make substantial cuts in it's spending, if it loses the UK net contributions?
And for that matter, the same former French finance minister that is and long has been part of the same establishment elite that shoved the EU on us in the first place without bothering go ask? The same elite that's so fond of sneering down their noses at rising levels of discontent, for various reasons, among a lot of EU countries and dismissing it as fascistic right wing, when in reality the only way it gets to be anything like large enough to be more than a noisy protest movement is if very large numbers of the population are prepared to vote for it, even if some of it is hard right. And some far left. Large enough, by the way, to be putting the next French Presidential election in doubt.
The same establishment elite that ignored the wishes of the people, in elections, and imposed a technocrat to run Italy, and shoved a bailout down the Greek's throats despite an anti-austerity party winning the election.
Or the same actual government that one month is telling us we can cope quite admirably, thank you very much, if we leave, which the PM will support unless he gets substantive reform, and then after getting a handful of minor amendments the legal enforceability of most of which is highly questionable at a minimum, is telling us it'll be economic catastrophe, or military Armageddon, or both, if we leave the protective arms of the EU. On which mutually exclusive occasion was our esteemed PM talking through his anatomical exhaust pipe?
Many of these supposedly authoritative experts, by the way, are the same ones that made similarly dire predictions of economic doom if the UK didn't join the Euro, and I can't think of any serious economists, or not more than a politically dogmatic indivual or two, prepared to seriously argue now that it would have been good for the UK if we had.
None of the economic bodies, politicians or individuals know what would happen post-Brexit, and that includes both sides. But few if any of those predicting economic disaster if we leave bother to tell us what their models predict if we stay in, with 26 out of 28 current EU members either in or treaty-obliged to join the Euro, when those 26 start ramming through economic measures designed to suit the 26, regardless of their effect on the UK.
They all imply, by omission at least, that the outlook is disaster if we leave, when that's nothing more than a modelling prediction based on assumptions they won't tell us, but the economic status quo if we don't, when the reality is that the EU is evolving, politically as well as economically, and the economic status quo is not an option.
Leaving has risks and, short-term at least, probably costs. But so does staying in, and those trying to bowbeat, scare and intimidate voters into staying never put any figures on the impact of EU evolution. If they're so damned prescient about the impact of one unknown and untested scenario, namely leaving, then they ought to be able to be prescient about the other, staying in an evolving EU.
Oh, and listen carefully to what these economic Cassandras say, even the likes of Carney, and it's "could" this, and "might" that. Well, the Euro "could" collapse, EU banks "could" implode, or a number of EU states "might" vote in anti-EU governments and the whole edifice shatters. Or we "could" get wiped out by a giant meteor impact, we "might" be saved from such by a benevolent, passing alien race, or the whole thing "might" be rendered academic by the 2nd Coming of Christ and a biblical "Revelation".
