
Originally Posted by
anthonykay
And it appears that there were plenty of people around who are really low in intelligence. And the leaders of the Leave campaign weren't going to disillusion them: £350million per week, anyone?
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.
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.]
We had a good deal with the EU: it was called Membership, and like all deals, it came with many strings attached. If we wanted to cut the strings, then we couldn't expect to keep the benefits.
It now seems that the only thing wrong with the so-called "Project Fear" was that it completely underestimated what a fearful mess it was all going to be.