This is funny, but my incredibly lame opinion is that while the government "agreeing on a diagnosis" would be very karmically satisfying for Remainers, it is neither politically feasible nor (more importantly) a prerequisite for tackling current challenges.
To continue Matt's analogy, the patient here admitting WHY his arm is broken isn't vital provided he admits that it IS and lets the doctor treat it.
The government won't magically gain new tools to address HGV shortages if Johnson, Cummings and Mogg all say "Brexit was dumb."
I am firmly convinced that by constantly pushing the government to admit that "THIS IS BREXIT, RIGHT?!?" its opponents are effectively giving it a free pass for the fact that the country is facing some pretty significant challenges on its watch. 🤷♂️
The central premise of Brexit was that the lives of UK Citizens could be improved if the UK government was less constrained in its decision making.
That means, post Brexit, the government should bear more responsibility for the state of the nation. Not less.
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First, rolling over an EU FTA may not be exactly as hard as negotiating a fresh deal, but it's still an achievement and Whitehall rando anons who have never been in a negotiating room should probably shut the fuck up about how easy it is.
Second, DIT does a lot of stuff other than negotiating free trade agreements and Whitehall officials of all people should know better than reducing a department to the one part of its work that makes headlines.
Third, the fact that the UK has in many cases (though not always) managed to secure for the UK deals nearly identical to those negotiated by the European Union, a bloc many times its economic weight, is worthy of praise, not derision.
1/ If you've never seen a departmental risk register, as mentioned by @TomTugendhat in his grilling of the Foreign Secretary, they work like this (at least in Australia)...
1/ I consider myself neoliberal and I think this is great.
Even if you disagree with some of their policy prescriptions (and I'm sure I do), there's no way you get ANY momentum on climate without passionate activism.
Think tankers writing 942 page reports can't do it alone.
2/ Even if you're a libertarian and believe 'the market will fix it' the nature of climate change means the demand has to be partially created by activism.
Loud activism boosted many of the current market demand signals driving green growth and innovation in clean technologies.
3/ There's a huge amount of complexity in tackling climate change in a practical, politically sustainable way. Most of the debates there don't fit on a placard.
However, the only reason we get to have the debate at all is activists keep pushing it onto the front page.
For the record, my employees wanted to be able to work from home when convenient without losing the spontaneity of office drop-in chats so we built a virtual one:
For those curious, this is three of us chatting in the hallways:
1/ Despite US support-in-principle, efforts to pass a WTO waiver for vaccine intellectual property seem quagmired in Geneva... and everyone here is about to take a month off.
1⃣ Disagreements among those who support a waiver on its scope (what it should cover) and duration (how long it should last, and procedure to end it); and
2⃣ EU and a handful of others still opposed or proposing non-waiver alternatives.
3/ Back when the US first announced its support in principle for the waiver, I wrote this thread on what I think might be happening:
I think activists may be undervaluing the chance the US position is actually maximum cynicism (#2).
Every week it gets harder to achieve the zen state required to separate legitimate underlying trade issues in something like the Northern Ireland Protocol from the nonsense politicians say, and have said, about them every time political points could be scored.
The NIP isn't flawless, and there are genuine grounds for complaint and concern...
... but fuck me is it hard to hear that from the people who declared it to be the single greatest negotiating accomplishment in human history, delivered by Johnson in spite of expert naysayers.
Experts: "The border has to go somewhere, and there are trade offs in terms of friction if you want to leave the EU SM/CU and not have a border on the island."
May's Team: "Yup."
Johnson's Team Then: "Fuck you nerds, no there aren't."