Post by Deleted on Oct 16, 2022 12:54:23 GMT
A great opinion piece from The Guardian. However, the question remains whether those who fell into the delusion can (or will?) truly break out of it.
www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/oct/14/markets-take-back-control-brexit-humiliation-britain-suez
This is the biggest humiliation of Britain since Suez, a reminder that no government can ignore reality
When the textbooks of the future come to the chapter we are living through, in the autumn of 2022, they will start with the summer of 2016: Brexit and the specific delusion that drove it.
They will point to the obvious impact of Britain’s decision to leave the European Union, and the role that played in upending a country once renowned for its stability. They might begin with the basics. Exit, they will write, shrank the UK economy thanks to a 5.2% fall in GDP, a 13.7% fall in investment and a similar drop in the trade in goods. That self-inflicted contraction helps explain why Britain felt international shocks – surging inflation, for example – harder than most. If your economy is smaller, you either have to tax people more to pay for the services they expect, or you cut those services, or you borrow. There are no other ways out.
Unless you resort to magical thinking. Which brings us to the second causal connection between the craziness of now and the turning point of 2016. Brexit broke the link between governance and reason, between policy and evidence. Until Brexit, politicians only rarely got away with defying the empirical facts or elementary logic. But in 2016 they pretended that a country could weaken its trading ties to its nearest neighbours and get richer, which is like saying you can step in a bath of ice and get warmer.
But there is a less obvious way in which Brexit made the current great unravelling a political death foretold. It turns on the idea that powered the urge to leave the EU more than any other: call it the sovereignty delusion.
The leavers’ slogan, “Take back control”, urged Britons to shake off the constraints of Brussels and become a proud, sovereign nation once more – a nation that, alone, would decide its fate. After Brexit, they promised, Britain would be the sole master of its destiny, unburdened by the need to consult or even accommodate anyone else.
The three weeks since Kwarteng delivered his mini-budget have seen the shattering of that delusion. For Truss and her now ex-chancellor were given the rudest of reminders that in our interdependent world there is no such thing as pure, untrammelled sovereignty. No government can do what the hell it likes, heedless of others. In this case, the restraint on sovereignty was not the EU: it was the money markets. But their verdict was as binding as any Brussels edict; in fact it was more so. They ordered the removal of a chancellor after just 38 days in office and the cancellation of the government’s economic strategy. It is the financial markets that have taken back control.
As remainers were mocked for pointing out six long years ago, there is no such thing as unfettered sovereignty in the 21st century: every country has to accommodate its neighbours, the global economy, reality. But the leavers, and their zealous convert Truss, refused to hear it. When Sunak tried to spell out these rudimentary facts, Conservative party members thought he was being a spoilsport.
As several economists have noted, Truss was acting as if Britain were the US, issuer of the world’s reserve currency, with markets falling over themselves to lend it money. Like Anthony Eden before her, she could not accept that Britain’s place is not what it was: it can never be sovereign like a king in a fairytale, able to bend the world to his will. That kind of sovereignty was always a fantasy, one that both fed Brexit and was fed by it.
She is finished, a hollow husk of a prime minister. But this is bigger than that. The Brexit bubble has burst. The country has seen that the Tory hallucination of an island able to command the tides was no more than a fever dream, and a dangerous one at that. We can pronounce Trussonomics dead. Bring on the day we can say the same of the delusion that spawned it.
www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/oct/14/markets-take-back-control-brexit-humiliation-britain-suez
This is the biggest humiliation of Britain since Suez, a reminder that no government can ignore reality
When the textbooks of the future come to the chapter we are living through, in the autumn of 2022, they will start with the summer of 2016: Brexit and the specific delusion that drove it.
They will point to the obvious impact of Britain’s decision to leave the European Union, and the role that played in upending a country once renowned for its stability. They might begin with the basics. Exit, they will write, shrank the UK economy thanks to a 5.2% fall in GDP, a 13.7% fall in investment and a similar drop in the trade in goods. That self-inflicted contraction helps explain why Britain felt international shocks – surging inflation, for example – harder than most. If your economy is smaller, you either have to tax people more to pay for the services they expect, or you cut those services, or you borrow. There are no other ways out.
Unless you resort to magical thinking. Which brings us to the second causal connection between the craziness of now and the turning point of 2016. Brexit broke the link between governance and reason, between policy and evidence. Until Brexit, politicians only rarely got away with defying the empirical facts or elementary logic. But in 2016 they pretended that a country could weaken its trading ties to its nearest neighbours and get richer, which is like saying you can step in a bath of ice and get warmer.
But there is a less obvious way in which Brexit made the current great unravelling a political death foretold. It turns on the idea that powered the urge to leave the EU more than any other: call it the sovereignty delusion.
The leavers’ slogan, “Take back control”, urged Britons to shake off the constraints of Brussels and become a proud, sovereign nation once more – a nation that, alone, would decide its fate. After Brexit, they promised, Britain would be the sole master of its destiny, unburdened by the need to consult or even accommodate anyone else.
The three weeks since Kwarteng delivered his mini-budget have seen the shattering of that delusion. For Truss and her now ex-chancellor were given the rudest of reminders that in our interdependent world there is no such thing as pure, untrammelled sovereignty. No government can do what the hell it likes, heedless of others. In this case, the restraint on sovereignty was not the EU: it was the money markets. But their verdict was as binding as any Brussels edict; in fact it was more so. They ordered the removal of a chancellor after just 38 days in office and the cancellation of the government’s economic strategy. It is the financial markets that have taken back control.
As remainers were mocked for pointing out six long years ago, there is no such thing as unfettered sovereignty in the 21st century: every country has to accommodate its neighbours, the global economy, reality. But the leavers, and their zealous convert Truss, refused to hear it. When Sunak tried to spell out these rudimentary facts, Conservative party members thought he was being a spoilsport.
As several economists have noted, Truss was acting as if Britain were the US, issuer of the world’s reserve currency, with markets falling over themselves to lend it money. Like Anthony Eden before her, she could not accept that Britain’s place is not what it was: it can never be sovereign like a king in a fairytale, able to bend the world to his will. That kind of sovereignty was always a fantasy, one that both fed Brexit and was fed by it.
She is finished, a hollow husk of a prime minister. But this is bigger than that. The Brexit bubble has burst. The country has seen that the Tory hallucination of an island able to command the tides was no more than a fever dream, and a dangerous one at that. We can pronounce Trussonomics dead. Bring on the day we can say the same of the delusion that spawned it.
