Short Thought on Brexit - leadership - what it is, and why the UK doesn't have it.

So my first " Short Thought" has to be about the current state of what laughingly passes for the Brexit debate in the UK.  We have a prime minister  and government who have become obsessively target fixated and locked into a destructive pattern of behaviour by this fixation coupled with an overwhelming desire to maintain Conservative Party unity at all costs up to and including harming the social, geopolitical and economic interests of the people who live in the UK.  As the latter is clearly impossible at the moment, this pattern of behaviour has become increasingly bizarre and embarrassingly inappropriate.

This is not what is to be expected of the government of an advanced country.  We expect mature leadership focused on a vision of what is good for all the people living in the country, not just a few.  Leadership is not slavishly following an ideology or the result of an ill-conceived and flawed referendum.  Leadership involves looking at the situation in the round and assessing the risks and opportunities inherent in the various possible ways forward.  As time goes by, information informing  these risks and opportunities becomes available.  A good leader would use that emerging information to reassess the situation and change approach accordingly while explaining to the people and persuading them of, the wisdom of that new approach. Eventually, a stable point is reached when a course of action is clear and should be implemented. 

Over the years since the referendum, the risks associated with any form of Brexit and the associated net closure of opportunity have become increasingly clear.  Given the derision with which the UK is now regarded, the resulting loss of international influence and the weight of negative economic evidence related to investment and consumption together with the increasing risk to the integrity of the Union and British society generally it is no longer reasonable to support any from of Brexit.  Given the consensus that the Irish border question needs a resolution that preserves a transparent border between the UK and the Republic of Ireland the possible forms of Brexit are somewhat limited to those that either defeat the object of leaving altogether or result in a weakening of the integrity of the UK along with a reduction in economic potential for the reduced and weakened remnant.. Neither of these are in the interests of the people of Britain so it seems to be me that the best course of action at this point is to reject the referendum result and revoke article 50.

This should then be followed by a long term policy aimed at social integration within the UK and with its EU partners including strong leadership towards reform both in the UK and more widely within the EU.

I will elaborate on why there is no beneficial Brexit, what "good for the people" means, why leadership needs to be based on principle rather than either  ideology, narrow self-interest or managerial target fixation in future posts.  Together these posts will set out what I am calling a philosophy of pragmatic ethical progressivism.

The future of this blog.

I haven't written a blog post in over a year.  I had intended to do maybe one or two a week of reasonable length, but that didn't happen for a number of reasons.

Over the last year things have continued to get worse for us all in terms of geopolitical, economic and social risk.  I have grown increasingly frustrated at the confused nature of public debate around, and reporting of, the issues.  I have also come to the conclusion that lengthy posts are not what is needed.

Therefore, the intention behind this blog is to try and provide easily digestible, practically useful pointers towards understanding and responding to the problems that threaten to overwhelm us. In doing this, I hope to contribute to the mitigation of that confusion and provide the bones of both a description of where we are and how we got here on the one hand, and a path towards a better future on the other.

I have spent a lot of time over the past year thinking and reading enough that I feel I am now able to start putting some thoughts out there.  I have decided to do this in the form of a series of what I am going to call "Short Thoughts". 

To that end, each topic needs to be focused and brief.  This means that what will appear here will be the results of my study and thought rather than an academic presentation of the path to those results.  Hopefully this will provide people with a set of tools to help inform there own thinking and for those inclined to debate, a set of tools to use in those debates with family and friends and may be in a more formal context.