Sebastian Abbott

Post | Brexit

Every Christmas, Easter and family birthday, as I list out the contents of a parcel on what feels like an excessively conspicuous “non-EU deliveries” sticker, then pay the suddenly exorbitant postage and customs fees to the UK; every time that, right at the end of the ordering process, a British website discovers that I’m based in Europe, or a European online store learns to its horror that I want to ship to the UK - indeed, every time I want to ship nice things, only to discover that they won’t, and now that the formerly anticipatory, family-related traipse to the post office has become a trudge to bureaucracy, I silently curse Brexit.
These are, in the grand scheme of things, little niggles, already well known to anyone who has ever wanted to ship to countries like the USA or Japan. But they always remind me that the UK - barely but clearly (though for some vague notion of “Brexit means Brexit”) - voted and then acted to make things worse than they had been until just very recently.
What good did it do?
For what and for whose benefit? From my perspective here in Germany, I still haven’t discerned anything concrete: nothing that has made Europeans look jealously across at their neighbours, the land of my birth, and want to change course in that direction.
Assuredly, there are people feeling good about Brexit back home, and like-minded tribalists around Europe who share the dream: a vague but powerful sense of “freedom”, a baseline intuition that the UK is not “beholden” to the admittedly confusing construct of European political entities, that the UK has been released from some dread dream of federalism or a “United States of Europe”, however far in the future, however long past their own lifetime. A UK unbound from European lethargy and tortuous consensus-building, able to spring free and react swiftly, or plan for a greater, divergent future: that sounds pretty good, I suppose.
Equally, though, the UK still needs to trade with the EU, and that trade has taken a significant and - in my view - unneccessary hit. It’s still a source of frustration to me that the likes of the wretched “European Research Group” managed to characterise the EU as simultaneously a homogeneous mass of “them”, and as an overly complicated, bureaucratic mishmash of cultures. The Brexit discourse, such as it was, cleverly split the double-sided nature of political diversity in Europe, ranging as it does from Costa in Portual and Scholz in Germany, to the likes of Orbán, Meloni, Fico in Slovakia and Wilders in the Netherlands; how that diversity makes consensus so difficult, on the one hand, yet also demonstrates the EU’s startling heterogeneity: quite clearly the opposite of the unified, “one size fits all” / lowest common denominator monolith (aka “enemy”) that all populists need.
It’s still unclear to me which, if any at all, of Britain’s latest or forthcoming legislations would not have been possible as a member of the EU…
Do we need Orbán to show that Brexit was unnecessary?
That Europe can still countenance an increasingly thin-skinned authoritarian in Orbán, who seems to idolise the others of his ilk (the usual suspects along the lines of Putin, Erdogan, Trump and Xi), is not a good sign, but it does at least seem to confirm that Brexit wasn’t required for the UK to be able hold extreme views, to argue for a severe limitation of immigration, for a country to be held hostage to simplistic, nationalistic, illiberal populist authoritarian ideologies.
Ideologies always tend towards a message of “greatness”, skipping the concept of “goodness”. Greatness requires winning, beating someone else to some goal, and - as mentioned above - having antagonists in the story. Goodness requires a careful balance of ethics, and is often extremely complicated.
Sovereign projects
The question of sovereignty in a highly networked, multi-nodal world is a genuine one. People want their votes to count in determining the course of their own country, without the idea of layers over them constraining their actions. The addition of supranational unions and associations, along with the increasing power of non-state actors in the digital realms (OpenAI, Google, et al), makes it understandable that many will want to withdraw from such a complex life, seek solace and clarity in a “tribe”, and perhaps even dream of just having a “strongdoofus” to solve all their problems.
But did leaving the EU truly provide a remedy to that complexity? I don’t see that it did.
Perhaps Brexit can be viewed as a grand project, without which politics can enter a period of “drift”; except, a project usually has a goal, and it seems that Brexit was the goal, with nothing else beyond.
There’s a similar case to be made for the EU right now: does it have an overarching project beyond its own creation, defence and maintenance? It would seem so: being a liberal democratic regional power to match the USA and China (along with all the many thousands of sub-projects that spin off from that).
Posting
With Brexit off the political menu in the UK for the foreseeable future, my hope is of the return of a general political will to rejoin the EU customs union, then to start engaging more constructively with other countries on the EU’s periphery; a return to a freedom of movement not just of people, but of the nice things that we have in Europe that I would love to share with my family back home, and for them to share nice British things once more with us…

Ah, Marmite…
A Happy New Year
Despite letting my niggles at the post office take me to excessive amateur politics, and despite the other tragic things going on in the world demonstrating humanity’s capacity for allowing bigotry and hopelessness result in violence and death rather than action to reverse them, I do want to wish everybody a Happy New Year, may your networks and connections grow broader and stronger, and your deliveries on time!

→ 7:00 PM, Jan 1

The Prevention Paradox of Brexit?

For a while during the initial phases of the first lockdown, there was some discussion about the prevention paradox, the risk that beneficial actions taken on a population basis will leave many individuals thinking: what’s the big deal, or, why should I pay that price?

A good summary of the prevention paradox is contained within this pre-Covid quote from the International Journal of Epidemiology (emphasis mine):
‘[the population strategy] offers only a small benefit to each individual, since most of them were going to be all right anyway, at least for many years. This leads to the prevention paradox: “A preventive measure which brings much benefit to the population [yet] offers little to each participating individual” … and thus there is poor motivation for the subject. … In mass prevention each individual has usually only a small expectation of benefit, and this small benefit can easily be outweighed by a small risk’
The first Covid lockdowns in Europe helped to slow the spread of the virus. However, since relatively few people knew anybody who had contracted the virus, there was an insidious view that led to the “huh - there’s nothing to worry about” perspective that in turn led to people ignoring the rules at the individual and small group level, because those individuals couldn’t truly process the cost-to-them-benefit-to-others analysis.

So… that link to Brexit, then?
It’s tenuous, I’ll admit, but since it did occur to me in this context, I’ll stick with trying to figure out what it was I thought I meant.

Having the UK in the EU was a form of prevention paradox because, although the weight of the UK and like-minded countries within the EU - those who were suspicious of ever-further integration - put a significant brake on that integration, nevertheless individuals and groups could still feel that having the UK in the EU was a higher cost to them, whilst never eliminating the risk of superstatism. If I try to parse the definition from above:

“[A preventive measure] … [brings much benefit to the population] yet [offers little to each participating individual]”

Becomes…

[Having the UK in the EU] … [enables free trade and bureaucracy-free travel to the whole country] yet [does not give each individual immediately better conditions, more money, succour in patriotism or prevent "the EU" from smashing “us” and “them all” together]

Something like that!

The opposite is clearer: now that Brexit has happened, could the EU now be more inclined to drift towards that federal superstate so detested in principle by those who loved their nations? Perhaps the fact of taking the UK out of the EU makes the thing that many were suspicious of more likely. It’s just that German and Dutch, Polish and Italian opponents of the superstate are no longer supported by their British colleagues.

Told-you-soism
You can imagine Brexiters now actively hoping that the EU will fling itself gung-ho into becoming a superstate, purely so that they can say “told you so!” Indeed, perhaps there is even now a secret clan within the European Research Group working behind the scenes to promote and to facilitate the institution of a Grand State of Europe…

The Brexit paradox?
Although I think I managed to squeeze the logic into the constraints of the definition of the paradox, I can’t strongly argue that the UK being in the EU was a true prevention paradox; it was just a prevention.

But this is exactly what I hoped that my blog would do for me - getting me to “think in writing”. This post has also been a thought starter for trying to describe what being European means to me.

→ 1:15 PM, Jan 6

Brexit and populism

From View from the EU: Britain ‘taken over by gamblers, liars, clowns and their cheerleaders’, a view from Helene von Bismarck:

“Populists depend on enemies, real or imagined, to legitimise their actions and deflect from their own shortcomings,” she said. If the EU has been the “enemy abroad” since 2016, it will steadily be replaced by “enemies within”: MPs, civil servants, judges, lawyers, experts, the BBC.
Oversimplification, lack of nuance are greedily seen as ways of cutting the Gordian knot of complex debate and “getting things done”. There are times and places for such methods, but not permanently in running a country.

Also, from John Crace in the same paper (On Boris’s big day, Tories kid themselves this is the deal they always wanted)

“He had united his party – if only temporarily – over Europe. So it was job done for Boris, as Brexit had mainly only been about divisions within his own party. “

→ 2:53 PM, Dec 31

The Brexit trade deal vote and Labour's seemingly intractable position

Labour had a seemingly impossible decision to make regarding the Brexit trade deal vote in the House of Commons on Wednesday 30th December.
Labour leader Keir Starmer is quoted as saying:
“The choice before the house today is perfectly simple. Do we implement the treaty that has been agreed with the EU, or do we not? If we choose not to, the outcome is clear: we leave the transition period without a deal. Without a deal on security, on trade, on fisheries. Without protection for our manufacturing sector, for farming, for countless businesses. And without a foothold to build a future relationship with the EU.”
To me, the words "perfectly simple" are rather disingenuous. Starmer tried to portray the judgement as a binary choice, whereby all other considerations are neglected. That can be seen as clear leadership; it can also be a sign of a leader uncomfortable with conflict.
Fortunately, there was some public debate on the day:
[Stella] Creasy said in a statement on her website: “Whatever Labour does, the Conservatives will cry foul, suggesting any attempt to scrutinise the deal after it is passed reveals a true intention to fight Brexit. The road ahead will be rocky for all concerned. To abstain is not to refuse to be part of that fight but to refuse to do so on the prime minister’s terms.”

Also, it seemed clear that, whatever Labour did, the bill would pass, as the Conservatives had a significant majority.

Kevin Brennan:

“While I understand the desire to move on I simply don’t understand why it’s necessary for those who believe this is a bad deal to vote for it, and dip their fingertips in this abject failure of national ambition,”

On the lack of parliamentary scrutiny, Clive Lewis put it thus:

“false framing, used to hold this house to ransom”

I presume Labour went through lots of war-gaming of the scenarios, but it doesn't quite seem that way. Their public website doesn't mention the Bill at all, and seems stuck in the 2019 election past:

Within three months of coming to power, a Labour government will secure a sensible deal. And within six months, we will put that deal to a public vote alongside the option to remain.

As with my previously denoted rolling of eyes at the lack of apparent decision analysis leading to the political contortions and distortions surrounding Brexit, I fail to recognise any systematic analysis of the situation. Again, I offer a fifteen-minute Decision FMEA structure as a very sketchy outline, which seems better than what we see in the news:

As we can see, nearly everything under Labour's control is about the messaging and the internal collaboration and consensus-building prior to the vote - it just doesn't seem as if this was done. The ramifications of voting against, or permitting a free vote (or abstention) seem pretty minimal, given the majority that the Conservatives have at this time.

→ 1:51 PM, Dec 31

The Brexit FMEA

The Brexit pre-mortem: BFMEA

Of all the engineering tools that I have encountered, the one that spans the widest spectrum of respect and scorn, hope and despair is the FMEA, the Failure Mode and Effects Analysis.

Developed by the US military and NASA and gradually adopted by the automotive industry from the 1970s onwards, it is intended to highlight things that could go wrong before they do; it's also a way of collecting and tracking the evidence (models, test reports, etc) that shows that the nuts and bolts have been proven before putting them on a rocket - or, indeed, jettisoning a country out of the European Union.

At its heart, the FMEA is a "what if?" analysis. Other methods are available, like the Potential Problem Analysis from Kepner-Tregoe. But I'm automotive, and the FMEA is a requirement in our field, so I've sketched up how a BFMEA (Brexit Failure Mode and Effects Analysis) might have been constructed and eventually look like. Why? Because I simply don't get the impression that the British government perceived the need for any such thinking before diving in to the apparently urgent political necessity that was the Brexit referendum result. And also, because sketching one up isn't all that hard - with practice.

Building the structure

First of all, you need to define what your product or system is, perhaps by following what was defined in the project scope (ABQP). The FMEA might be for a full system, or it might be for an individual component that fits into that system: For our purposes now, it's Brexit. Brexit has a few functions and requirements that I cobbled together in five minutes (naturally with no little help from hindsight):

What could possibly go wrong (failures)?

With an FMEA, you focus on failures first and foremost (it can be a depressing trudge, initially, which is why engineers are always so miserable. Are we? We must be). Put yourself in Law-maker Murphy's shoes, maybe even his socks and underwear, too. The fresh ones.

Then "all" you need to do is to go through each of your functions, wishes, desires, needs, etc: and define all the ways they can fail (one more example here):

How could it come to this (causes)?

If failures are the symptoms, then causes are the bugs that deserve our attention.

Again, with every failure having its very own potential cause, or causes, we need to repeat the trudge around the houses. I've kept it relatively simple here:

Somebody will have to do something about this (actions)!

The whole point of the FMEA is to discover potential failures and to cut them off at the source: we don't want those bugs getting in that resulted in us hollering into the toilet bowl. So the positive aspect of the FMEA is assigning to-dos to each cause, like "make sure you wash your hands before eating", with the intention of preventing those causes from occurring in the first place (absent a time machine):

So much to do! Where to start (Effects)?

There's one letter we haven't touched in the FMEA yet: the E. Effects. Determining what happens as a result of the failures can be useful in figuring out what actions should be prioritised. You might for example preferentially allocate work on avoiding failures that would otherwise result in conflict on the Irish border over events that would lead to slightly less curved cucumbers still landing on British shores.

But understanding where to prioritise political effects (disgruntlement amongst 48% of voters, for example) is beyond my realm of experience, and represents a clear disconnect between the "plodding reality" of engineering and the human rationality (in all its technical irrationality) that defines politics. Some things might not be "prioritisable" at all. At least until someone works out an official Happiness scale that would be able to balance lots of low-level general contentment (hey, being in the EU isn't actually all that bad most of the time) against intense doses of uproar (they're defining cucumbers again!). Do I digress? I believe I do.

Presenting the BFMEA

Typically, FMEAs aren't presented in the network style that I employed to build mine: the traditional method is the worksheet, which typically leads teams to try and build them in Excel or similar. This is what mine would look like in that format.

It's OK, but a bit sterile. Which is I suppose how it should be. Right? "Real" FMEAs have ratings numbers that help in the prioritisation of tasks, which I have omitted here.

Build and forget?

The FMEA is intended to be a so-called "living document". As new events occur and lessons are (ha!) learned; as new and fantastical failure modes with subtle, complex, causes are discovered, the FMEA grows: often becoming unmanageable, or at least rather unwelcoming in the process. Unless someone or some team is really "living" complex FMEAs as a role, they will bulk up, dry out and fossilise.

In one sense, that's not necessarily a bad thing: if at least in the act of setting it up important considerations were made in that emotionless setting, potentially resulting in actions being taken that avoided some grand faux pas or other, then it will have been useful without too much investment in resources.

Do they? Can they?

It would be fascinating to find out what methods the British Government has at its disposal (and which were used thus far): because, to all appearances, they weren't.

Perhaps they're saving them for the debates surrounding the re-entry into Europe, then.

BFMEA network and other points

Here's the network FMEA that I built up over the weekend. To those engineers reading this who are experienced in FMEA methods: I acknowledge the existence of Occurrence and Detection items. I didn't bother with ratings, as FMEAs can really get bogged down with them - but some sort of prioritisation is required, of course. To those outside of my industry: have you encountered similar "constricted thinking" methods? It would be fascinating to hear from you!

→ 8:28 PM, Mar 20

ABQP: Brexit as an automotive project
ABQP: Advanced Brexit Quality Planning

It is surely doing the British Civil Service an injustice to suggest that there was no planning process for Brexit. However, what we see in the media strongly suggests that whatever planning did take place was swiftly overcome by politics: the votes upon votes in Parliament, the pontificating and hardening of views, the dreams shattered and still dearly held. We hear of Papers stating one potential outcome or another, but the feeling remains of a Brexit ship veering ponderously from port to port, turning away from each in disgust without ever reaching one.

I'm an automotive engineer, and could imagine Brexit being an automotive project; there would (in my imaginings, anyway) have been a clear baseline for planning, thinking, moulding, approving or even cancelling the project before it's too late.

Comparing Brexit with a VW Polo facelift? Ridiculous! Well, yes, but I feel there are some lessons in the processes that we use in industry that might have been better learned before embarking on this huge undertaking. (Otherwise I won't have writting this, I suppose).

Naturally, the advantage that the auto industry has over the Brexit project is that it can produce many models and, with experience, assuming the company survives (which many didn't ), see what sticks. Brexit is a one-shot action that will take decades to mould after the event. But, anyway, here are my thoughts on the Brexit Project from an automotive perspective:

APQP: Advanced Project Quality Planning

Every automotive company has its own flavour of APQP, but the basics are defined and even - of course - available on Wikipedia. Some key aspects that I would highlight here would be:
- Planning and Defining the Program
- Product Design and Validation
- Understanding the needs of the customer
- Analysing (/predicting) and mitigating failure
It's a plodding, check-box laden process and certainly not in the vogueish agile development process domain - but therein lies its strength as well as tedious weakness: it enforces slow, measured and team-based thinking, rather than snap decision-making.

Irrespective of whether I think Brexit is a good idea or not, the process appears to have been entrained without even a basic level of planning. Was there any sensible product definition of Brexit before kicking off Article 50 and the two-year negotiation period? (Leave Means Leave is not a helpful definition, at least in my book).

Advanced Brexit Quality Planning: A light-gloom-hearted ABQP Statement Of Work

Project Name

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland to exit the EU.

Project Scope

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland intends to leave the EU. No other countries will leave the EU. All components of the UK shall leave the EU, including Gibraltar and the Channel Islands. The UK intends not to bow to EU regulations. This normally means not having the same level of access to the European market as available at present. The UK intends to keep the same level of access to the European market. Leaving the EU means developing new alignments with... well, every country in the world, as well as with the EU.

Project Type

APQP: Advanced Product Quality Planning with 5 Phases.
1. Plan and Define Program
2. Product Design and Development Verification
3. Process Design and Development Verification
4. Product and Process Validation and Production Feedback
5. Launch, Assessment & Corrective Action
Phase 1: Plan and Define Program

1.1 Identify the needs of the customer

1.1.1 Identify the customer

The customer is all citizens of the UK (including those younger than 25 at the time of voting who, though disproportionately affected, voted at a significantly lower rate their older, perhaps more caring compatriots). Citizens of other EU countries in the UK will... have to lump it. British citizens resident in the EU will... have to lump whatever treatment they are given wherever they are living (they deserve it, the traitors) until such time as they return to the fold.

1.1.2 The needs of said customer

Right. Those needs. Yes. It is absolutely clear that all inhabitants of the UK want the best possible deal. In fact, they want more than the best possible deal, they want the best of everything, which is what was promised.

Also: no more immigrants and no more being told how to run a country by a democratically-challenged council of flouncing Eurocrats.

And: no European Superstate.

1.2 Develop timing plan

Target date: Open-end until Article 50 is invoked, so plenty of time to develop a statement of work, specifications and requirements, a strategy and tactics to achieve an acceptable level of that target.

Article 50 has been invoked

Wha...?

Deadline is now May 2019.

You're kidding... Umm, on what grounds was Article 50 invoked?

None that anyone can discern; negotiations will be the easiest ever anyway. There was something about the EU not showing its hand until Article 50 had been invoked: unhelpful gamesmanship, a trap that the British Government, gleefully bellowing "freedom from!" fell into

1.3 Develop Budget

The EU will be on their knees in a few months. So no real budget is required, no contingency planning, just a few negotiators and the rest is a win for us!

1.4 Assemble Team

See 1.3 above, OK, plus their advisors. No need to listen to the people any more, they've had their vote. And we don't need experts any more, either. We'll ignore the Civil Service, too.

Phase 2: Product Design and Development Verification

2.1 Develop Product requirements

The Brexit product requirement is... Leave! OK, more seriously, there might be some relevant functions of Brexit that we might want to consider:
- Restore / Increase British national autonomy
- Restore / Increase national togetherness
- Significantly reduce immigration
- Increase internal investment (e.g. NHS)
- Retain and protect UK integrity (e.g. Northern Ireland)
- Protect inter-Irish peace
- Avoid becoming part of the EU Superstate
Are these measurable? Most are. The intangibles (national togetherness) will need more definition as the programme progresses. Can they be modelled? What sort of Brexit would result in maximising the wins across the maximum number of functions?

Predicting and mitigating failures (BFMEA)

The FMEA (Failure Mode and Effects Analysis ) is a key engineering tool, initially developed by NASA with the intention of foreclosing failures before they occur.

NASA was also a specialist in one-shot efforts.

... but that we'll save that for my next post.

Phase 2 (Continued)

Oh never mind: Phase 2,3,4 Finished!

LAUNCH
→ 9:44 PM, Mar 17

The unvalidated state

The unvalidated state

Well, that all went somewhat awry, didn’t it?

I must confess that I was prepared neither for the result of the referendum on Thursday 23rd June nor for its impact on my state of mind. I spent most of Friday, 24th June 2016, in a strangely blank pall of frustration, disbelief, even - briefly - anger, plus an element of intrigue at what the future will bring. Such a complex bubbling brew of emotions will take some time to subside as this weekend peters out into another week, the first of a long, long series of weeks, months and years bringing ructions and repercussions in my homeland along with administrative hurdles and considerations of nationality for me personally.

Questioning our sanity

Did 52% of Britons really, actively, vote to exit the EU? It doesn’t seem that way: the EU was never really the point during the less than savoury referendum campaign. Those who voted for Leave were sold a dream of “reclaiming our sovereignty” without being told why the EU was bad for them personally, nor what would be improved for them personally once Britain left the EU. Did 48% really vote for the EU, or were they simply hoping for the relatively quiet life of being able to travel, work, study, buy and sell within what has become a large and appealingly non-homogeneous patchwork of countries whilst tacitly accepting the bewilderingly opaque bureaucratic apparatus that enables it?

Was the referendum correctly set up in the first place? Was 50% the correct limit for such a momentous decision, or should it have been 2/3rds? Should oldies - pensioners - have been allowed to vote at all? Can’t the Queen step in and say: “you bally idiots, it’s our (Queen’s perogative) country and we shall stay in the EU, if only so that one won’t have to produce one’s passport when travelling to one’s castle in Balmoral.”?

Whatever the answers to these questions, we are now left in the precarious position of Britain being a product sold yet never tested or proven out. We don’t even know if it will remain intact over the coming years: in engineering terms, it’s a state that was never validated before it was introduced to the customer.

Trial by error

The Leave campaign was based on disassociated presumptions that were packed into sentences in such a way as to sound like a way for the disaffected English middle to break free of - something - and to arrive at a much better - something else. Unfortunately, the Remain campaign was equally pathetic, having realised fairly early on (presumably in the split second after David Cameron announced the referendum), that the EU is impossible to be passionate about these days.

Neither side made any attempt made to list out the various implications of each necessary step towards leaving the EU, and could therefore make no list of mitigating measures to prevent the worst of those repercussions hitting the UK as hard as it might.

The UK’s relationship with Europe and the rest of the world will have to be hammered out in real-time as uncertainties - and some avoidable certainties - cause unpleasant and unforeseen things to happen.

The future UK will only become what it will be once everything that might happen to it has happened to it. And not much of that will have been properly thought through before the 23rd of June - it certainly won’t adhere to the peddaled flickers of a dream of a greater, better, Britain.

What now? A question to self

There still seems to be a residual hope that the increasingly well-known Article 50 (the procedure for leaving the EU) won’t be triggered: but there’s no great point in holding out for that, especially as I wouldn’t have to act if that turns out to be the case.

If Britain really does start to extricate itself from the EU, I’ll presumably have to start acting - so I should start planning soon or risk falling into the same “dreamland trap” as the politicians. It will most likely involve looking to apply for a European (Irish or German) passport and finding out how my status in Germany will change over time.

But that’s all for the future. For now I need to strip out as much of the first three feelings that I mentioned at the top of this post - frustration, disbelief, anger - and settle to a state of vaguely positive curiosity as to how things will turn out.

This will mean reading as little as possible about the politicians (the Boris Johnsons, Michael Goves, Iain Duncan-Smiths and F*****s of this world), forgetting as much as possible the geographic and demographic divides that this referendum revealed, and hoping that the British “Apparat”, the civil servants, regulators, negotiators and the like, are as good as they might reasonably be expected to be when entering discussions with their European, American, Chinese counterparts…

… or am I selling myself yet another dream?

→ 11:00 PM, Jun 26

Bremain Perspectives

A note to my friends and contacts in the UK

Don't leave me stranded on the Continent...!
If there have been any verifiable facts in the debate over Britain's referendum to stay in or to leave Europe to its own devices, I missed them. It's all (up to the lamentable murder of Jo Cox, MP) been an ever more unedifying and frankly embarrassing spectacle of bellowings, bawlings and balderdash ratcheting down to the lowest common denominator red-herrings of immigration and outliers on the EU regulations spectrum.

So I can't and won't base my thoughts on any clear factual basis. What remain are feelings and conscience, which crystallise in and out as I change perspective. But whatever the perspective, my feelings and conscience compel me to ask you to vote "Remain", if only on the basis that I don't want my life made even more complicated than it already is.
About me and my European friends

I live and work in Germany. Nope, not in "Europe", but in Germany. Equally, an Italian friend of mine in Heidelberg didn't move from Europe to Europe for work - he's as Italian as he ever was, perhaps even more so now he's surrounded by barbarians. It's the old discussion I remember having at school, but sometimes it's totally worth remembering that Europe is as diverse as it ever has been, but thanks to 'Europe' our countries no longer have to go to war amongst themselves to express this diversity.

My Perspectives
Me being me, I can only describe some of my ways of looking at the whole theme of Europe. Your opinions and perspectives may diverge from mine. That's great! (just vote Remain, OK?)
The automotive business perspective

I work as an engineer in the automotive business - emphatically not as a vegetable-straightness worrier (or engine emissions regulator) in Brussels - and to me It doesn't get much clearer than this: Honda, Toyota, Nissan, Jaguar Land Rover and hundreds of suppliers don't want suddenly to be not in Europe. I'm guessing most other industries think similarly.

I've seen talk that the UK would balance additional customs charges with Europe with the freedom to individually negotiate import duties with other global trading partners. But doesn't having a strong negotiating position somewhat depend on being large? There aren't many trading partners larger than the European Union. The EU is notoriously split inwardly on many issues and can never seem to give a straight answer: that's true and pertinent to the discussion - but is the United Kingdom of {England, Wales, Scotland} and Northern Ireland significantly more coherent than the EU?

What about other non-EU countries? Switzerland? Japan? South Korea? They're doing OK, aren't they? That's true, and perhaps there are potential models for an "independent" Britain to look at: but we can do that from within the context of the EU (whose regulations we still have to meet in order to trade), especially as Britain still has the flexibility of Sterling (which is another theme altogether).
The engineer's perspective
Have there been any testable and disprovable theories in all of these discussions? No, and I accept that it would be unreasonable for us to expect too much of what is such a messily human, emotive, political theme. But an engineer should remain alert to the differences between a sub-optimal actuality and a much-improved dream.

When we work on developing next-generation products, we create our theories, our models, our prototypes - and we test the hell out of them to discover their limits, to prove (or disprove) that their implementation would indeed result in a better world than what we have at present. Until then, we stick to what we know and have validated.

What the Brexit campaigners seem to be doing is asking a whole union of disparate countries, regions and cultures (yes, that's Britain I'm talking about) to leap into a dream scenario that can't be modelled, simluated or trialled in advance.

The engineer's way would be to build a smaller island just off the UK (like the now-famous Guernsey, for example), and exit that first, to test the waters. But I doubt the Johnsons or Farages of this world would have the patience or the funding for anything as long-term as that.

Wasn't it the same when Britain entered the EU? An unknowable quantity? In one sense, yes, but Britain stood before two equally unsure paths: joining a new, peacable and ideologically appealing community, or staying away whilst the Empire crumbled. The benefits of joining the EU look to have been palpably clearer than of staying away. But perhaps Edward Heath and his government were wrong in 1973 whilst Boris Johnson et al are simply right... right?

A family man's perspective
I'm happy for my children to have British nationality and German passports, but my wife and I are mono-nationalities. I'm also very much in the lower quartile of the population when it comes to acceptance of bureaucracy - so for that reason, and because I don't want to be forced to apply for German nationality or to have to plod through ever increasingly baroque and rococo bureaucratic mazes just to stay where I am, thank you very much.

A European sceptic's perspective
The biggie with the EU is the democratic deficit. Did we vote for Donald Tusk and Herman van Rompuy? Oh, and I mentioned the word deficit, which has overwhelmingly ecomonic overtones. How badly has (whatever Europe actually is) handled the economic crisis, become overly sensitive to the proclivities of German voters? How embarrassing has the infighting over Syrian refugees been...?

Wouldn't it be great to just say "stuff it" and to leave them to this monstrosity of a mess they've gotten themselves into? I can accept that that's a tempting thought - and a key reason for British governments to stumble time after time over this uneven, barely traversable terrain. Equally, I can see there having been a compelling reason for David Cameron to push to issue to the level it has reached now: similar to the Scottish referendum, it should be a once-in-a-generation "clear the air" initiative. I just wonder if Cameron realised how close this would come to being a severe miscalculation

A Briton's perspective
Finally, I'm still very much a Brit! Mine is no doubt a somewhat skewed relationship with my home country: I've been living away from it for nine years now. I despaired at the frothy celebrity culture, the seeming superficiality of what I saw in the media... And sometimes it takes chats with non-British people to remind me of the deep qualities embedded in our country. But I then just need to think of you, my family, friends and colleagues past and present to remember what we are: uniquely British in our upbringing, a welcome, if sometimes grating, addition to the uniquely unpinpointable European family.

→ 8:47 PM, Jun 20