That I am in favour of Brexit should be fairly obvious, I even stood as an MEP candidate for Ukip so, yes, obviously. However, that then brings us to the question of How Brexit? To which my answer would be just let’s go. And if necessary let’s go hard. Without the details sorted, without the jots and tittles having been inked in.
No, not because I think this is the best way that could exist in some ethereal plane, but because I think it’s rather the best we’re likely to get in this one.
But there’s another, more philosophical reason for this, erm, reasoning. The very thing we’re leaving, the European Union, is based upon that continental idea that there must be a plan for everything, a rule, a regulation, to tell people what they must do. To me the need to leave the EU has always been about escaping that very concept of governance. You know, the one where we put all the anal retentives into offices, give them power over us, then marvel in wonder as they come up with rules that it requires 7 chopping blocks to make a sandwich.
That’s not really the British way. That British way that did indeed make us Top Country for some hundreds of years. The British way which is to rather muddle through, without any grand plans or detailed designs, but to just get things done as and when they need to be done. After all, it has been said we gained that Empire in a fit of absent mindedness. We never did have that Industrial Revolution because our rulers thought it was a good idea nor that they planned or it – they were rather sniffy about both it and the people who did it. The Friendly Societies didn’t arise because someone in Whitehall thought they should, it was the voluntary interaction of private actors that did all of that.
Leaving is, to me, to allow us to return – yes, how conservative but if you read Chakrabortty and the like on the left these days they seem to recommend it too – to those days when the Little Platoons decide everything and government does only that which absolutely has to be done by government. Which is why there’s a certain marvel at the competing visions of Brexit. Those who would have us remain in the EU, in that system of total bureaucracy, are demanding that we have the total bureaucracy plan for Brexit itself. Not really getting that the aim is to be out of the total bureaucracy idea itself.
This is not just closely analagous to the free market idea it is it at root. What ‘s Britain going to be like after Brexit? Whatever the interactions of the 66 million of us with the other 7 billion in the world will make it. The world order being something emergent from the interactions of the people. Not something defined by the bureaucracy, not even something to make plans for or about.
Yes, of course, utopian vision because the anal retentives never will go away. But that is the dream. The future is what we make it with our freedom and liberty, what we make with our freedom and liberty being the very future that we desire and should have. Our leaving the EU, Brexit, is to enable us to do this – which is why having plans other than let’s wait and see what we do such an odd thing to do about Brexit.