Drowning in ignorance

While people are getting caught up by the remainer shenanigans dragging Brexit through the courts, the debate is becoming mired in the easy hit tribal politics with no actual serious debate happening about the sort of Brexit we really do want. 

Legal hobbyists are having a field day picking the arguments apart as to whether a legal challenge will stick, but they are completely ignoring the elephant in the room that we have a government virtually asleep at the wheel with no agenda for Brexit and no idea how to accomplish it. This court case is bicycle shed syndrome. We are leaving the EU regardless.

If anything the debate is going backwards with old nostrums reasserting themselves with a vengeance. We are no closer to a consensus on a way forward and people who should know better keep falling for the decoys. 

Meanwhile we have a political class, particularly on the left talking about the customs union and the single market without the slightest comprehension of what these terms even mean. We are in serious danger of sleepwalking into a pigs ear of a Brexit (a dog's Brexit even) and nobody will see it coming simply because they're distracted by the noise. I could go and live in a log cabin in Siberia for a few months and the debate would still not have moved on. 

Though we are well past any possibility of hard Brexit, we are potentially looking at a humiliating crisis as those tasked with leaving are massively out of their depth, unprepared for the scale of it, and hopelessly inadequate to the task at hand. 

Worse still it would appear that very little sense is getting through. If the kind of dribble we see from Liam Halligan still passes for serious commentary then we know that there is still only a thin grasp of the issues within the bubble. Regardless of the volumes that have been written on the technicalities of Brexit, it still seems that fatuous know-nothings rule the roost and they feel no obligation to inform themselves. They live behind an impenetrable ideological firewall where conformity is more valued than knowledge.

The supercilious noise that qualifies as journalism is not adding anything to the debate, is failing to inform, and bloggers are left out in the cold as if we didn't exist. With each passing day, hopes of an intelligent Brexit fade and I fear we will all look on helplessly as project Brexit crashes against the rocks. Unless Mrs May has something up her sleeve, and there is no reason to believe that she has, we are looking at a very messy divorce. The sad part is, it's all so very avoidable.