This episode exposes, with exquisite clarity, the world we have entered.
What Steve Baker thought @CER_Grant said, or remembered he'd said - wasn't what he said.
And it shows how impossible it is for civil servants when it comes to Brexit. /1
What Steve Baker thought @CER_Grant said, or remembered he'd said - wasn't what he said.
And it shows how impossible it is for civil servants when it comes to Brexit. /1
If you are a civil servant - in DexEU, or Treasury or DIT - whatever you produce, however faithfully you try to produce it, is howled down as partisan, remoaner propaganda. You cannot win. This is very dangerous territory. /2
It is also why DexEU, or the Government, should insist that the cross-Whitehall paper on costs of varying Brexit models is published, in full, with full working.
Let's ask the economists at LSE, at IMF or whichever independent economist you like to check the modelling /3
Let's ask the economists at LSE, at IMF or whichever independent economist you like to check the modelling /3
It is true there are unknowns - secondary or 'dynamic' effects that are hard to quantify, but no so much that you couldn't tell if the Treasury or whoever was trying to skew outcomes. /4
Then this paper not a Treasury conspiracy, as Baker and JRM allege, but something more prosaic: an attempt to brief the Cabinet so they can make informed decision. (Campaign in poetry, even it it is economic doggerel, but govern in prose) /5
It's also why the leaking of the paper - journalist chapeau to @AlbertoNardelli - ironically hurts, not helps, the cause of pragmatists over purists.
It allows Mr Baker and JRM to paint as conspiracy what was conceived as an attempt to bring some rigour to Cabinet table. /6
It allows Mr Baker and JRM to paint as conspiracy what was conceived as an attempt to bring some rigour to Cabinet table. /6
The current febrile situation gives every civil service paper a kind of gelignite quality.
In my experience, it is not true that 'they're all remainers' - the ones that know the EU well, are more than alive to it's flaws. They have lived them. /7
In my experience, it is not true that 'they're all remainers' - the ones that know the EU well, are more than alive to it's flaws. They have lived them. /7
But that doesn't mean, in delivering on the vote to leave, they seek to deliver chaos.
These are people, after all, 'who make the trains run on time'.
I'm sure there's a rabid remoaner or two. But most I know want to get the UK to the destination, just one step at a time. END
These are people, after all, 'who make the trains run on time'.
I'm sure there's a rabid remoaner or two. But most I know want to get the UK to the destination, just one step at a time. END
