The most significant thinker in the Brexit movement went further. Richard North, the advocate of “Flexcit”, warned that,
Richard is many things including dogged and often correct but most significant?
Rationally, a flexible approach made sense. But by the winter of 2013 the market for rational politics was faltering. North described how Lawson and his fellow judges excluded from the shortlist entries that said the only way to leave the EU was to follow the Norwegian example. Until that point, he had had regular meetings with Arron Banks, Owen Patterson and Cummings. “But something then happened – I don’t know what. Cummings went dark on me and I was ‘no platformed’.”
Well, yes. To be perhaps a little harsh there’s a touch of the Ritchie here, in that Richard tends to work on the my way or the highway principle, leading to a certain difficulty in remaining in the warm embrace of an organisation. That he is indeed often right doesn’t change this.
He might have got somewhere but he is an ego man. Like Nigel Farage whom he despises. Farage is the more personable despite his tendency to try to fix things behind the scenes. North is a “no-nonsense, my way or the highway” type of egomaniac. He is hard-working and a meticulous researcher but his Norway-style delusions show he is not so clever as he reckons. It is a telling sign that lots of remain scum cluster in his comments. Because they know “Norway” is a pile of crap.
This can be read as saying that Tuber is often right.
Lawson and his fellow judges excluded from the shortlist entries that said the only way to leave the EU was to follow the Norwegian example
Yarp. I, too, remember teachers using the angry red pen when I handed in factually inaccurate homework.
The Only Way Is Norway is so exceptional it gets picked up by a special bus with delicious windows every day.
How about this plan for leaving the EU:
1) Leave the EU
2) Offer them reciprocal free trade in goods with no strings attached
3) If they say “Nein”, stick with WTO tariffs but lower import charges on stuff we regard as vital (food, medicine, The Ultimate Ibiza Chillout CD Vol XLVII)
Easy peasy, innit.
1. Burn the existing treaties
2. Keep the existing laws for harmonisation.
3. Negotiate international agreements
4. Gradually remove the bad rules from our laws.
But the problem is that remain never made this an issue. They viewed the proles as idiots who could be swayed by ludicrous threats of what would happen and thought winning would be a pushover.
I used to read EU Referendum from the earliest days, but got tired of North’s endless insults of people he disagreed with. Disagreement on nuances of one topic condemmed one to a status of permanent imbecility about everything.
I remember his writings on the Battle of Britain being a blunt instrument he used to batter Churchill’s reputation over his references to “The Few”, when really it was “The Many”. All true, but one came to the conclusion that North sought to belittle a great man solely to elevate himself.
My Grandmother used to say (when talk of treaties and international agreements came on the news) ‘Treaties are but bits of paper!’ which she said was a Bismarck quote, though I can’t find those exact words, though he did say similar themed things.
Either way, its my go to response to the whole ‘we mustn’t break out international agreements’ argument over Brexit…….
North is a bureaucrat by training and thus sees Brexit through that lens. All sorts of Nowhere Man fiddling with this and that to disengage in an orderly way so as to break not one delicate crystal nose flute. Despite his supposed deep understanding of “the way things work”, he seems clueless about how the Eurocrats would have kept us skipping on that flexible rope forever.
Farage realised that Brexit required bold, primitive political manoeuvring, including a specific avoidance of detail to prevent interminable fallouts between a loose coalition.
There is a reason people call Richard and Peter North the Roose and Ramsey Bolton of Brexit.
I stopped going to the old curmudgeon’s site years ago, for the same reason as everybody else. I founf flexcit to be a detailed ten-year plan to undo the Gordian Knot. I prefer a more alexandrian solution.
What strikes me about RN is that he has a very ‘lawyerly’ vision of things – “such and such is impossible because of this or that law”, whereas it appears to me that the EU is quite happy to “just lie” (in Tim’s words) when it suits political purposes.
But he was the only person I am aware of who posted on the EU-origins of the Grenfell disaster.
He says he became a curmudgeon because being nice didn’t work. Quite possible, I guess.
Being an arse doesn’t work for him either. Ego is his nature–not some habit he has fallen into. His lad is the same.