(Original post by Andrew97)
And remainers are incapable of realising that Doris from Bolton doesn’t give a **** about economics.
And that is the real crux of the problem -- the whole thing is just extremely complex; Doris from Bolton is affected by economics regardless of whether she cares about it or understands it. If her living costs rise faster than her income, then she will be poorer; if she is employed in a job which depends upon single market access for her employer to make a profit, then she may lose her job if her employer ends up in a situation where the business is less profitable, or maybe even not profitable at all and needs to close. She may not care about economics, but she will care about her quality of life and ability to pay for her own living costs.
Then there's the wider impact on the public finances; Doris from Bolton probably needs public services; all of which are funded by tax revenues (and especially from corporation tax - e.g. big banks in the City which pay around £70bn per year in tax), so if the economy takes a hit (even if the hit is "only temporary" for a few years, which seems to be the justification for why this is OK -- "it will be fine in the long term", etc.) then those public services will be cut back for a very long time for even taken away (especially under a Tory govt.). She needs police to keep her town safe, hospitals in case she falls ill, the kids who live near her need a good school education so that they don't end up turning to a life of crime, etc.
While i'm on the subject, there's a real problem that all the analysis is being rejected by the cheerleaders in some parts of the media, the ERG and their allies, using ad-hominem attacks such as "establishment elite" upon anybody who has substantial experience and expertise in the area of economics. These are cynical and malcious attempts to shout-down and ridicule those who attempt to explain why economics are important to peoples' every-day lives.
Absolutely anybody who attempts to talk publicly about the economic reality and how it can affect real people's every-day lives is consistently dismissed as if they're telling some kind of made-up children's bogeyman story. Those who are dismissing the claims have absolutely no credible counter-argument of their own to make, so they stoop down to ad-hominem personal character attacks instead. Frankly, dismissing anybody using terms like "establishment elite" is a logical fallacy. Anybody whose only rebuttal to an argument is to attack the character of whoever is making the argument by calling them a name has already lost that argument.
The trend of believing that experts are wrong is extremely worrying because it defies all logic and is an absurdly irrational thing to say. I personally cannot fathom how anyone can genuinely be persuaded to believe that those who have an education in the subject or significant experience working in finance/banking are somehow clueless about economics or that their words are simply to be rejected/ignored -- quite the opposite; those people are the only ones who truly have the skills required to be able to perform a sufficiently in-depth analysis of the situation and make any kind of reasoned, well-measured predictions on what the possible outcomes are; and while many people may not like the conclusions, they are the conclusions which have been reached almost unanimously across the whole of the planet (especially in countries outside the EU, such as the US, Japan, China, Australia...).
Go to first unread
