500,000 to 800,000 jobs lost and immediate recession just be merely voting to leave anyone? How did that work out? I wonder how many people were inclined to vote Leave but did the opposite because they were scared they would immediately lose their jobs. This idea that somehow Leave won by lying and cheating while Remain played by the Queensberry rules is laughable. As CL has pointed out, the Remain side had all the advantages and used the machinery of the state to try and win e.g. spending £9 million of taxpayer's money for propaganda leaflets, enlisting an American president to tell us we would be at the "back of the queue" for any trade deal with the US etc.
With both sides employing economic common-sense it should have been the easiest deal in history. We start from regulatory equivalence, which is not the case in any other trade deal that has ever been negotiated. The fact that it hasn't been is because of the desire of the EU to punish the UK for having the temerity to leave.People also seemed to believe the lies about it being really easy to make a good trade deal with the EU within two years, "because they would want to keep selling us their BMWs", even though this flew in the face of all the evidence: it took 7 years to seal the Canada/EU deal, and the attempt to make a deal between the EU and USA collapsed completely.
I agreed with a lot of what Witton said on Brexit but I differed a little on this point. I think a trade deal is preferable to WTO rules but that we should have begun planning for a no-deal scenario and falling back on WTO rules at the outset. This has two advantages. Firstly it means the disruption is reduced should a deal not be agreed and secondly it would make the likelihood of it happening much less. The Government has criminally failed to plan and as a result we have ended up with an appalling deal. Teresa May's statement that no-deal was better than a bad deal had no credibility at all with the EU.After the referendum, Witton Park of this parish was arguing that we should simply announce that we will be trading on WTO terms. Although I wanted to remain, I thought that if we had to leave, then WP's argument made a lot of sense: there would be a nasty shock to the economy (or at least many sectors of it), but at least we would all know what the shock was going to be, and we could try to prepare for it. [Of course this wouldn't solve the Irish border question.]
As for the Irish border question, as I said earlier in the thread, that is just a fictitious problem created by Brussels to throw a spanner in the works with Dublin's collusion. There was an interesting article by Dominic Raab in yesterday's Sunday Times. He said that British diplomats had fed back to him that top EU officials had decided that the loss of Northern Ireland would be the price the UK would pay for leaving.