Brexit: The book

I often feel that the vast majority of people in the UK (including Scotland) know very little about the EU, believing it is basically a glorified free-trade area.

This lack of understanding has made it very easy for the right-wing media to portray the EU as being out of control, when most of the time it is doing exactly what it was supposed to do.

Ian Dunt’s wee book about Brexit is thus very much needed. A lot of it is basically teaching the reader about the EU and the associated countries (with chapter headings such as “What is the European project?”, “What is the single market?”, “Norway” and “Switzerland”), and only then does it proceed to look at the details of Brexit, cataloguing the hurdles ahead (e.g., “How can we keep the UK together?”, “How talented are the Brexit ministers?” and “Making a new country”).

In general it’s a fine book. Many people have described it as really scary, but I actually found it too positive and optimistic about Brexit in places. There are many interesting details in it – for instance this bit about vets was entirely new to me:

Industry estimates suggest that 95% of vets in meat hygiene graduated elsewhere in the EU. British vets simply do not like the work. The problem is not only it is more poorly paid, though it is. The trouble is that someone willing to go through the extensive training requirements of veterinary medicine generally does not do so in order to spend their working life watching animals being killd and the washing of their carcasses by former convicts.

I didn’t like the chapter about Scotland much, though. I think the author has spent too much time speaking to Unionists or Yellow Tribe members like Alex Neil, because he seems to think that getting more powers devolved to Scotland (e.g., with regard to agriculture and fishing) would satisfy pro-independence voters, when of course it wouldn’t. Those powers would be pointless because they’d need to be handed back to the EU post-independence, and they wouldn’t allow us to build a more compassionate and socially just society, which is what motivates most of us.

In the concluding chapter, Ian Dunt suggests that the outcome of Brexit will be a European Hongkong:

Britain is about to experience a toxic mix of weak law and strong lobbying. It is tantamount to switching a country off and on again. Except that it will not revert to its original state. It will revert, in all likelihood, to a low-tax, low-regulation laissez faire economy, more akin to that of Singapore or Hong Kong than the countries on the Continent. [p.161]

As I’ve explained in another article, I agree this would seem like the likely result, and if we can’t prevent a hard Brexit from happening, we need to get out before it’s too late.

If you aren’t a major EU policy wonk, you’ll probably learn a lot of useful stuff from reading this book, and if you are, it’s still a useful list of all the options and obstacles in one place. Everybody should read it before it’s too late.