Sebastian Abbott - Referendum

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?

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.