Bregretfullness ?

Couple of Brexit pieces today. Haven't had any of those for a while, and not without good reason.

First, one of the Guardian's better, more critical pieces. It's quite a long one but worth reading in full.

Matters came to a head in November 2021 at a weekly prayer group that Baker, a Christian, attended in Westminster. “I suddenly just started crying,” he recalled. “I couldn’t control it. I couldn’t speak. I was just clutching myself, sobbing my heart out.” One of the reasons that he was opening up about that now, he said, was that “I’m very conscious there’s lots of people out there who blame me for their misery. But it’s an unfortunate thing on this question of leave and remain that leaving has caused a great deal of anxiety and anger and depression for a lot of people. But being in the EU has caused a lot of anxiety and anger and depression for people…”

I really have very little sympathy for Baker, who is a colossally stupid individual; I care not much for his pointless misery. Exactly how “being in the EU” has ever caused anyone any anxiety or anger is never, never, not fucking once clearly explained with any form of any rationality whatsoever. All the same, credit where credit is due : we should welcome people who realise their mistakes. You don’t go on kicking someone after they’ve surrendered. That’s just malicious, and there’s no point in it.

(I would make exceptions for certain extreme outliers, however.)

If there is one certainty about the coming political conference season it is that considered arguments for and against Brexit will not be aired. The Tories will crow about Brexit being done. The Labour frontbench will solemnly observe that past tense, and avoid the B-word, as if it is a triggering trauma for the party and the country, best left undisturbed… “It’s become so divisive, that even raising the issue seems almost a provocative act. There’s a sense that we just can’t talk about this at all any more.”

Guilty as charged; I’ve barely mentioned it since it happened. Partly that’s because of The Event(s), but partly because I don’t feel it would do any good. There was a period in which it looked like a second referendum was a very real possibility - how close we really came I don’t know - but politics went for a general election instead. Since then there has been very little in the way of opportunity for a reverse. But no mistake, I still think it’s as stupid a decision as I ever did. It’s dumb. It’s idiotic. It’s cutting one’s throat to spite one’s arse, or something. I hate it. But for the sake of sanity, I also can’t dwell on it.

“A man with a conviction is a hard man to change,” Festinger wrote. “Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point. But suppose he is presented with evidence, unequivocal and undeniable evidence, that his belief is wrong: what will happen? The individual will frequently emerge, not only unshaken, but even more convinced of the truth of his beliefs than ever before. Indeed, he may even show a new fervour about convincing and converting other people to his view.” Welcome to Brexit.

Mmm. I saw somewhere something earlier about how in politics, one’s friends can sometimes be more dangerous than enemies… enemies expect to disagree with you, but friends expect you to be perfect or else.

About evidence. The data seldom if ever speaks for itself, but is rather subject to interpretation - we "read in" meaning, as with this very silly woman who thought that Netflix was calling her gay. But, as I've mentioned before, even so the data does speak for itself within one's own framework. If you voted Brexit because you wanted fewer trade restrictions, and actually now you find it's causes the opposite, then a rational person would begin to shift their stance. Not everyone is a true believer, but I'll get back to that at the end.

“Though we all have these underlying predispositions at the genetic level, to be a little bit more conservative or a little bit more liberal, these can be altered by environmental circumstances. And by far the most important environmental circumstances, if you’re a human, is your social milieu. If you’re an ant you can tell who is ‘us’ and who is ‘them’ with a very quick sniff. If you are a human it is more complex, and we put lot of work into that.”

To anyone interested in persuasion I can’t recommend Damon Centola’s Change highly enough. He perhaps overstates the case, but nevertheless shows that a lot of changing our minds is more about what everyone around us thinks than how we ourselves asses data directly. We operate more on metadata; if lots of trusted colleagues believe something, we probably will as well.

Beyond this it gets more complicated, but the basic method of changing beliefs boils down to something like this. First, you take a group of supporters of whatever position you believe in, and then you intersperse them with a (small) fraction of unbelievers. It’s vitally important that the believers get to talk to each other as well as the unconverted, this means they support and reinforce each other’s arguments as well as appearing more persuasive by number to the unconvinced. Then, you stick this group somewhere in the fringes. They must not be at the centre of a network but on the outskirts, because those at the centre - so-called “influencers” are actually only espousing the dominant view, they are not actually influencing but instead are the most subject to influence. So you keep your group away from this and let the idea spread around naturally, until those at the heart of it are more-or-less compelled to change. At least, that's what I remember off the top of my head.

It's time to bring in the second piece. Chris Grey notes that a consensus on Brexit does appear to be emerging : 

Thus, overall, there is a certain kind of consensus here, around three things: the vast majority of electors do not think that Brexit has been a success and the great majority of voters do not support greater divergence from the EU and the great majority of voters either support or at least do not object to the UK seeking a closer relationship with the EU....  a miserable 9% of the public think that Brexit has been a success. Far from solving any of Britain’s problems, Brexit is now itself a problem in need of a solution. So what might the solution be?

The short answer being, "there isn't a good one", except of course the very obvious one. Grey notes that of the solutions which have been proposed/tried :

For commentators and politicians who are not in power, it is easy to sustain that faith, but almost invariably, when in power, it becomes impossible to do so in the face of reality. That is why so many Brexiters, when given the power to implement it, went on to resign. Brexit Secretaries David Davis and Dominic Raab are both examples. They preferred to keep their faith intact rather than face reality, but others did the opposite and faced reality, for which the faithful inevitably despised them.

He goes on to discuss the polling in some detail, noting that, "re-joiners have more to do, but much to celebrate", and that however limited the polling change is, it's still something for us tofu-eating wokeratti liberals to take comfort in. 

According to some polls the preference margin to rejoin is considerably stronger than Grey reports : 63% to 37%, a 26 point lead ! Though, digging into the data, this is not a strictly accurate report. The raw numbers are actually 50% rejoin, 30% stay out - you have to take out all the rest (don't know, wouldn't vote, didn't answer) to get to the first numbers. Even so, that's still a 20 point lead for rejoin ! The 10 point lead in the same poll supporting actually having another referendum in the next decade is similarly encouraging.

For all that persuasion is difficult and that people assess claims in part by what everyone else thinks... they're hardly entirely data blind. If they can experience directly for themselves that things are not working as advertised, they do shift their stance. It's only the hardcore faithful who tie themselves in cognitive knots to reinterpret the evidence at least when it's literally right in front of their face; most ordinary people don't care about the Cause that much. Most such Causes are rather abstract to people, hence we get armchair villains and heroes alike - they might profess to believe something, vote for it, maybe even attend a protest... but they seldom directly experience its effects. When they do, I suggest, reality usually takes over.

The million-pound question is whether anyone should do anything about these results. "Never interrupt your enemy while he is making a mistake", Napoleon is supposed to have said, and indeed this swing has happened perhaps because of a lack of campaigning rather than in spite of it. If a major political figure were to jump on these figures and decide to run with it, it would certainly inspire True Rejoiners like me, but whether it would actually encourage or alienate the more casually interested in a very much harder to say.

What Rejoin needs, I think, is a pretext. We need some clear, simple event which would naturally prompt the question, "hey, wouldn't it be better to be back in the EU now ?". The cost of living crisis and the other Brexit-based failures are not quite enough by themselves for this. We need something more rapid and even more unambiguous, some major success of the EU that leaves us trailing, or conversely, yet another idiotic failure by the government where everyone can see the EU's approach is far superior. At that point, perhaps, a courageous (not in the Yes Minister sense) enough leader might have something to work with.

We'll see. Stranger things have happened. Then again, more likely things have failed to happen.