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What never ceases to amaze me is how little Leavers understood about their long held specialist subject. And how little many of them seem to grasp it now after 3 years of being bombarded with it over and over.
Raab, Davis, Patel and that crowd are like adults dumped in total immersion in a foreign country who after three years can't do any more than point at things in shops and say 'yes?'.
Some of them evidently are pretty stupid. But they are important enough to attract people to help them that are not and want to get on by being useful.
It's almost as if the actual details of Brexit, its costs and benefits, the intellectual, administrative and legal tasks of doing it... are not that interesting or important to them.
Brexit is not about leaving the EU at all. These are mere tribal identifying words. Leading with detail and policies and analyses is a marker of not being in the tribe.
What will historians make of David Davis' article in ConHome just before the referendum, explaining how individual EU countries will negotiate separate deals with us? Or Raab's talk about the Dover-Calais link?
Analyses of how preference for Brexit correlates with other social attitudes need to bear in mind that if Brexit is empty in this way then you are correlating something with itself.
Analogy - Cameron trying to gain favour with the ordinary bloke by mentioning his football team, but seeming to support West Ham one day and Aston Villa the next.
Cameron wasn't interested in football. Didn't follow a football team. But he wanted the tribal marker of someone that did, so claimed to be a Villa supporter.
Like the Brexiters, Cameron did not have sufficient interest to retain more than a passing detail - that his supposed team wore claret and blue. So not surprisingly he later thought he supported West Ham.
Given that the returns to seeming to be an ordinary man were so high, it's retrospectively astonishing that he could not overcome his lack of interest in the game.
But, apparently, it really is tedious for those who don't like it. [Sorry, but I do, so I have to rely on independent accounts of the ennui it produces]. Viz the Simpsons sketch on footballers endlessly passing the ball around.
Likewise, the subject of the economics of trade gravity for a typical Brexiter: zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
The subject of the Ireland-Northern Ireland conflict and the Good Friday Agreement for a typical Brexiter: zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
The details of what European Regulations actually are and do: zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. Much better to give speeches about made up cabbage rules.
I'll confess to not knowing much about all this myself before the Referendum. A sceptical indifference to the political infrastructure of the EU; a detail-free inclination to the free trade encouraged by the "single market" [whatever that was to me].
But since then the public space has been bombarded with high quality syntheses of the detail on the Single Market, GFA, WTO, our own legal processes, all of it. Yet to many prominent Brexiters this is ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ
