Thread by @atatimelikethis

This is a long thread because now we've entered Brexit end game it's important that we explain it in depth.

There's geeky trade stuff, tons of deception and a lot of background. This means it's hard to simplify, so we're hoping others will do that when they absorb the thread.

It's also quite a relief. Those of us involved in brexit on both sides have been in a war for 4 years and everyone is tired.

But no one knew how it would end.

Or rather, as we hope to show, many people had speculated on this sort of outcome, they just didn't know the specifics.

This can't be impartial. But we'll try to remove anger and blame, following the tragic human Brexit story.

And sorry, but we need to tell you that leave or remain, all of us have lost, except the shady funders of brexit and now they have kicked off how you'll be sold a win.

So. This story starts with you needing to put your conspiracy theories away.

And we mean that.

You've been polishing them for years, you're attached. Put them down please.

We don't care if you look at brexit and see fascism or look at it and see freedom. They were all fiction.

As @carolecadwalla has said many times, and we're sorry to horribly take her out of context, follow the money

If you're remain Brexit never needed dark arts or fascist grabs for power to be explained

If you're leave it never needed control or borders or freedom from brussels

These justifications are just that, they are a fiction, overlaid on a Web, overlaid on lies, and often desparate attempts of otherwise intelligent people to explain, spin, sell, defend and attack the project.

Every one of them is wrong, but more importantly they are unnecessary

Brexit is a project in the billions affecting British trade in the 100s of billions affecting global trade in the trillions.

Did you really think it was about immigration?

Or crypto fascist take over?

Or corby nationalising rail?

Or Facebook and CA?

It's far more important.

For now, accept that the vast money associated with trade, where that money is held, who taxes it and how it is spent is and always was the game.

The rest is just noise. Arguments for selling the game are as fictional as the conspiracies.

Leave or remain. We're all pawns

Brexit is not the first time the game was played and it won't be the last which is why you can dump conspiracy because you don't need it.

That we humans are greedy and pursue wealth and want to control it. Does this need conspiracy?

So follow the money who wins? Who loses?

If there is a major shift between global trade blocks, then like water through a sluice, trade moves. It doesn't go away.

Some of it may be splashed out, some may leak but the river flows.

Sometimes those shifts are managed well, sometimes badly. Brexit is a disaster for all.

Well most. We'll come onto that...

So you can see if there's a big shift in EU trade it's going from the EU to somewhere else, and as Theresa May pointed out, you make your choice. EU, US or China.

You don't need dark arts. It just is.

What made us laugh out loud...

... is when we realised that this time, after all the fighting almost nothing would change at all.

Stop. Put that conspiracy away.

We don't mean BINO. We don't mean EEC. That's wrapping.

Fundamentally the UK is staying in Europe trade flows. EU membership or not is irrelevant.

You see once you accept dark forces don't exist you have to think real world.

Of course there are winners and losers but there aren't a few. There are 1000s and that's just counting those with resources to lobby.

And they are lobbying all the time for many incompatible reasons

We could name some of them. That would make this thread political since we would filter. The network of leave and remain funding, already mapped on twitter, will never end.

Please accept lobbyists exist are paid based on self interest? That's not too conspiratorial is it?

Because you are most likely one of those funders. Paying one of the lobbyists. Donated to leave or remain? If you read threads like this, probably.

The difference between regular people and the big boys is we get to fund the story, they often get a seat at the table writing it.

Let's talk story writing. This lobbying goes on day in day out. It's organic. Let's call it a tweet.

Millions of tweets are pumped out every day, somr people pour hours into them, some just post kittens. All hope they go viral, some fizzel for a while but almost none ever fly

So now twitter is the real world and the stories are product of PR or marketing people but they're all just stories, all just funded by people with agendas.

Some stories fly. Most die.

Horribly fatalistic isn't it?

There's also rarely any single owner of a story, which is very annoying if you want to find someone to blame or attack.

Climate change is a story that many on the political right hate. But it has no author.

Gun ownership is a story many on the left hate. It has no one owner.

And Brexit, brexit was just one of those stories. Wandering around in the ether, told in many ways, by many people.

In the UK multiple versions of the story have been told for 40 years. So Who pushed it first? Impossible to say even the positions of left and right changed

The last point is important because it reminds you that stories can be used for different purposes.

And boy has brexit in all its forms and with all its names been abused

Left and right have both used it both to argue for protectionism and free trade. Go figure. Short memories

At this point in the thread, dear reader, if you're still here, then we'd like to put some lines in the sand.

1. Brexit is a story
2. Stories can be moulded by PR folk often around anything
3. This is used to push agendas
4. Agendas are funded. Often by the rich, sometimes you

You may be wondering where politicians are in all this?

They're on the train with m us. They have more ability to push stories simply due to resource, but they are also just pushing agendas.

Some have noble reasons, others are self serving. Their success is close to random.

However. There is one huge difference.

Politicians definitely are held to account to manage the stories that everyone is creating to lobby them.

They ultimately decide what policies the stories contain.

Even if they cannot control the story, they can choose what's included.

This has been painted in colours with brexit like never before with lobbying about what it will and will not contain.

Some of that has been honourable, much dishonorable on both sides and it has changed over and over and over again.

Hence the mess.

Because brexit is a mess. Brexit is that unique obscure thread that hung around on twitter for 40 years, a fringe debate for wonks. that no one else cared about (check the data most important voter issues).

It's a mess because all of a sudden it got retweeted 60 million times.

Remember stories are abused. We may never know what made that tweet go viral.

Cameron - took the risk to push it mainstream?
Immigration added to the story?
Austerity haters voted against a tory project - did you forget tories were huge remainers?

Short memories.

It doesn't matter
It just got bigger faster than anyone ever imagined.

And yes funders who benefit from money flows to the US mostly backed leave.

And those who backed the EU mostly backed remain.

And not even then consistently.

Thosr who funded the story early think they own it
Oh we want to blame diamond money so much.
But to blame you have to assign benefit. And those who funded brexit as was in 2015/16 have long since lost control.
Lots of money
Lots of lobbyists
Lots of stories abuse.

Now we need to touch on something that maybe will have the Leavers switch off. We'll try to do it so they don't.

Many people were certain what brexit meant to them in 2016
There was not consistency
There was no manifesto.
There has subsequently been disagreement.

How was that?

We tried to do that without stepping on thorns. That you can all agree with.

And if we did that successfully maybe you can also agree that someone did eventually need to decide what policies brexit would contain.

And this is where it all became very dangerous.

So much time has been spent on the interpretation of EUref2016. The reason we've taken some time off recently is to compile data on where and how the brexit detail was debated.

We'd like to say agreed but discussing that is too hot for a thread that is trying to stay neutral

What we can say definitively is that policy debate on what policies are included in brexit rose exponentially after the referendum. And maybe unsurprisingly around keynote speaches and impasses.

We can also say that media coverage also rose exponentially even after the campaigns

This is very unusual for referenda. In fact we have been unable to find a referendum in any other country that follows the same trend

Even bitter unresolved issues like Scottish or Spanish or Canadian independence died down after their referenda, at least for a while

Not brexit

So far as we can tell, while huge media scrutiny has been pointed at campaign spending, almost none has been pointed at post campaign lobbying.

Our analysis on this is sketchy, it's hard to know what lobbyists are spending where. But we can look at devoted real estate in papers

There's a major problem with newspaper analysis. A few of us took a jobs in papers just to try to understand them more for brexit

What you want to do is look at coverage, then assess media value if that same area had been devoted to advertising.

It's an awful methodology.

Because you have editors who work independently from advertisers who devote space to opinion unrelated to commercial value.

Damn. We did the calc, it showed a 400% increase in space use. We concluded no one would care if anyone even checked.

So someone suggested we dump the media value approach and instead compared pre/post campaign coverage and specifically counted articles associate with precise policy detail during the campaign and after. We did this by article word.

Normally after would lose heavily.

Now. Annoyingly, we think that it's subsequently become a bit of a joke about how much detail was debated on brexit after the ref.

Leavers say that's remainers watering down brexit.

Remainers say it's leavers adding things that were never included.

They seem to be both right.

Comparing an average week of policy coverage during euref16 to after until June 2019, we think that editorial word count shot up by over 2000%. Bizarrely article count went over 3000%.

So more detail but also more rate. It is the largest media panic we think the UK has ever had

Finally we looked at the coverage of the issues that have become the final dividing lines.

Oddly you already know these are exponential, the % increases are so large that they're essentially infinite.

Our conclusion, no matter your vote, is brexit been decided since the ref.

A quick note on numbers. We have asked some journalists to get advice about whether we should release our scrappy excel workings.

The concensus is this will cloud our assertions in a political bun fight about assumptions.

So if you think we're lying. Go count yourself.

Suffice as to say we would have dodged the quant part of this if we thought it was controversial.

Another bizarre reality of Brexit is everyone knows it's true that brexit has been being decided right up to last night.

Depending on your camp you'll argue for different reasons.

Brexit is not what you think it is, and neither are the negotiations.

First off there are three true negotiations and millions of lobbyists. One is known, one has intentionally been suppressed and one is nonsense. Large parts of our media should be asking why.

These are

Known - EU/UK
Suppressed - US/UK
Nonsense - Tory party

You want to know where the policy detail is centred? You know already right?

K 10%
S 0%
N 90%

Honestly we think N is 95% but we have to give some credit to nominally EU articles that descended into tory

Based on this we now have to make an assertion that we cannot prove, but we think it's probably uncontroversial at this stage.

We believe we've spent 3 years locked between the EU and US deciding who will give us the best deal. No one has covered this issue, or progression.

We also believe that the internecine war in the tory Party has been utterly inconsequential to the outcome of those negotiations.

Depending on whether you're in conspiracy land it's either a distraction or a media conspiracy to deceive.

We think it's a bloody mess

We're into the end quarter of this longest of threads now and so if you've been patient this far we know we need to tell you where this ends

Dear reader. You can be sure we will not let you down.

The UK and the world think brexit has been a war of ideology.

It's been nothing of the sort. Even issues like the backstop only became important because they affected a large amount of money of very rich people

But that wasn't what was going on. That's just more lobbying.

In fact brexit has been an exercise in deciding who we will get back into bed with and the real fight is will British interests in Europe or in the US win.

You see we've had it all backwards and if there's one thing I'd like to say to our noble negotiators, then it's well done.

If we had been them, we'd want to take our politicians, our media and ourselves by the ears and shout "do you think we're stupid"

Brexit has been used to undermine the UK. Ironically by Leave and remain.

You see it never was what deal could we get. It was who had the best offer

You remember we said trade is water? It flows? One way or another.

Sure. It can spill or leak and if Brexit is mismanaged more then it might even flood.

If there's blame it's for those who risk our country's legacy arguing for how the outcome of that negotiation will be sold

And now. Thanks to Mr Boltons visit we know

And we know the winners and losers have nothing to do with leave and remain

They even have little to do with the dark funders, though they have got their tax concession

Nah, it's British business that has won, lost and for some both

There seems to be no reason for brexit to have been so messy. There's certainly no reason not to talk about the only 3 trade options and while we wondered if we'd go with China, post Huawei that decision was clearly made (really you thought that was about 5G?)

There also seems to be no advantage to the anger. The whole country is divided. It will take generations to heal.

Ok consirpacy theorists, maybe some rich newspaper owners didn't want their offshore funds taxed but really? All this mess to cover that up.

And then why no deal? Why frighten diabetics and cancer sufferers needlessly when it wasn't ever about who'd give us a deal.

It was about who we'd do a deal with.

There were 2 options, yesterday Bolton found out it was the EU, we imagine that was decided relatively recently.

But what the mess of Brexit has done is made it incredibly difficult now that we've decided our best interests are not to shift to the US block.

Somehow we must leave the EU while not leaving it and while making everyone happy. And I mean leavers and remainers

May failed badly

And this morning Boris told us his alternative.

Obviously he can't present it. You can't tell the country that brexit is one thing for 3 years when it's actually about something else and not continue the lie.

But we knew there had to be a solution.

And this one is perplexing

Most of us through if they decided EU which for us was not at all clear they'd go down the EEC route. Boris would invoke the spiffing spirit of the 70s, we'd be going back to the model we used to have and were quite happy with thank you.

We even thought he'd silence the backstop lot. No one is going to live with a global open border where you can smuggle so if we sold to the Americans it woukd close. If we sold to the Europeans it would stay open.

EEC would simply be a rehash of norway or something.

Boris would suppress the backstoppers who only care about it because they don't want all that nritish wealth under the control of the EU.

Ok, that's a difficult lobby with lots of money but we write the damn EU directive. Maybe a deal would have been done.

Whats happened is a LOT more precarious, a lot more risky and whether its the outcome of cloudy thinking, awful media management, or just the complete mess, who knows.

It's the sort of grubby compromise that we're famous for but really should have been better solved.

It was obvious the US had lost with the disgraced Liam Fox' departure from Government.

But the scale of the loss and how quickly we folded our cards and walked away from US under Johnson is what has shocked us. Hence the real time nature of this thread.

We thought we had weeks.

Some of us even have the emergence of a begrudging respect at the clarity of decision, even a little comforted, offset completely by him also being the primarily self motivated brexit mess maker.

So now brexit is done. What's going to be sold and why the risk?

"Sector by Sector"

Get used to these words. They had been repeated on the BBC 60 times today at a 13.45 count and that's just radio 4.

They are this year's strong and stable and they are the solution for the most outspoken of hard Brexiters

You see there is a big problem with the switching of a trade block that's only exacerbated by our deeply unpatriotic politic (honestly the whole of the top of the media should be fired, just for where they've got us. Don't they think? ).

It's called YOU MUST MAKE A CHOICE

This was staggeringly obvious before the ref and it will be thus until somehow a new trade block rises or the sun burns out.

We as a country have got ourselves to a point where so much crap has been loaded into brexit that whateber the choice it is now messy as we could make it.

This choice is basically on just one thing. And we can't talk about it as we should be because of all the rest of the noise.

It's simple. Will we stick with the US trade agreements we have through the EU, or move to the US block with an FTA.

So many tears for something we knew

You may be asking "what EU US trade deals" but that's because you've confusing story, lobbying and positioning (a marketing word for lying)

We have fine trade agreements already with the US. They are stuctured across 30+ separate bilaterals and we know that coz of TTIP.

This is close to the end so we're not going down the TTIP rabbit hole, but if you don't know it was the FTA that the US (not EU) walked away from. And we know that because we helped steer the common EU position. We even know why they walked and what everyone hated.

And everyone really hated TTIP. Why do you think you've had politicians trying to spin their way through chlorinated chicken?

The worst thing tho. When we were in TTIP we could blame the EU for forcing it on us

British politicians looked very naked if they had to be accountable

There was also the minor inconvenience that since we already had trade agreements with the US through the EU that a future deal would have very few advantages.

And then in probably the world's worst example of negotiating strategy no deal became a thing.

Historians will argue - did No Deal itself kill off any hope of US trade?
In the round we think not, but it probably stuck in the knife and twisted it

As Orwell said. People playing with fire who don't know it's hot.

Not our finest hour. Imagine you're part of our US team.

1. What have we got as leverage?
2. Well we don't need them, we have all the access rights we need through the EU.
1. Well they either put something on the table, or we walk
2. Oh shit. Did you see this no deal thing?
1. WTF. In Washington? Now you take my leverage away?
Idiots

Some people think no deal was an invention of those lobbying for a US deal.
It's so harmful to our position and so stupidly myopic in its understanding that we think it's just more Brexit, and media mess.

Either way the US deal was read but now we have to sell it.

So instead of the EEC solution, the crafty buggers in the Brexit Bunker have come up with what we're calling USINO, in honour of its cousin, BINO.

This is gonna need another few tweets to explain and then we're done

USINO is a political fiction created to cover up a brilliant negotiation by British civil servants because we cant admit it:

1. We'll say we have a US sector by sector agreement
2 it will be our EU sector bilaterals
3. Because we've made our EU choice
4. Solving the backstop.

5. We have to stay in customs union, maybe we do some gentleman's arrangement on that. No one will admit it.
6. Which includes avoiding offshore tax directive, which we mostly created but now can't take. Or the ERG will kick off.
7. Single market has to go. No free movement

7 will be nasty but it's no where near as bad as 5.
8. We'll still effectively be in the EU but we'll tell the mob we've left to sign a US agreement we have already.
9. Because we haven't left also tell remainers that a brilliant exit agreement with the EU solves everything.

Except we won't actually have left.
10. Because we'll be permanently tied to the EU trade block but with no negotiation power
11. A true vassal state. But this time the ERG will support it because they got number 6.
12 we night hide EU payments via US

Will it work?

Many grubby British deals have, and the advantage is this one gives most of the angry lobbyists no reason to shout anymore.

Even the anti immigrant mob who'll find ending free movement does bugger all about their concerns since it wasnt the problem.

But you can be sure everyone will support it, and the media will finally fall in line.

Afterall that's why ex journalist and right wing columnist Boris got the job old boy.

And all for the price of becoming a true vassal state.

Whst a truly epic fluster cluck it has been.

Thread broke here so adding continuation.

https://twitter.com/atatimelikethis/status/1161274469517791233?s=19