1/ To understand why virtually no one who voted Leave actually wanted a "Hard" Brexit of the type that a no-deal would deliver you just have to look at the opposite side of the equation.
2/ I know many Leave voters and they are, by and large, sensible and informed individuals (why would I be friends with them if they weren't?) They tend to be people with very personal or professional reasons to dislike EU bureaucracy.
3 / None of them voted for an economically apocalyptic no deal Brexit, and if this had been the option in 2016 they'd have voted Remain. They are, as I said, by and large sensible and intelligent people. They just voted Leave. 17m did.
4 / Their side 'won' in the referendum by a small margin 52/48 and then thought that the deal they had been told was easy would be delivered, almost immediately. They didn't think it was a vote for a poisonous divorce full of the language of 'betrayal' & "enemies"
5 / Now, imagine (it's not hard) that Remain had won the referendum and think about what a HARD Remain would have looked like. The absolute extreme - like a WTO Leave - would have been joining the Euro & total, complete political integration. Possible a United States of Europe.
6 / I know virtually no "Remain" voters (and I know many) who would have voted for that - myself included. That is the total, head-banging extreme of 'Remain'. The mirror of the daft, ignorant WTO option now being (astonishingly) discussed as a potential outcome by Johnson.
7 / The Brexit debate has become a toxic shit-show of noisy extreme views. Virtually no one with a shred of common sense wants a walk-away No Deal. The sensible option (common market, no political union, loose ties, no tariffs) is the EFTA/Norway deal that we were told was likely
8 / BTW, we were also told by grifters like Farage that this was the likely option. Before this whole thing became a ludicrous "who's the biggest patriot" contest flooded with extreme language & noisy twattery.
9 / Extremes are dangerous. Extremists even more so.
10 / There is one daft extreme from extreme "Leavers" who seem to think that any & all "Remainers" are rich, live in Islington & would sell their children to Angela Merkel given half the chance. I don't recognise any of my friends in this group.
11 / The other daft patronising extreme from extreme "Remainers" is that any & all "Leavers" are thick, duped, ill-informed bigots who are one step removed from Hermann Goring. I don't recognise any of my friends in this group either.
12 / The problem has become that the debate - especially on Twitter - has been overtaken by a noisy minority on both sides. There is a very sensible solution if both sides are willing to compromise & stop using the language of war for something that isn't a war.
13 / If you see any negotiation as binary matter of "winners" and "losers" it rarely ends well. Johnson & Gove are playing a very silly game of chicken with peoples lives, jobs and businesses. And it's time they stopped.
14 / Most half decent people I know now recognise how daft and damaging a zero-sum game is. Extreme Leave is as ludicrous as Extreme Remain. If either of those things had been on the ballot in 2016 it would have been heavily rejected.
15 / As an aside every friend of mine in every European country (and their media) is increasingly looking on aghast at the UK like having to watch a mate self-harm through a window when you're powerless to intervene. They genuinely don't get it.
16 / I hope after 4.5 years of shouting and increasingly inflammatory language we can just now decide to adopt what was the only sensible option at the start. A common market with no political union. It's an option, it's there, if only the grifters stopped grifting.
17 / Thanks for listening. Bet not many of you still are :)
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