This week in Brexitland Extra: an introduction to "How Brexit Will Be Reversed"

First off, thank you all for subscribing to “This Week in Brexitland Extra”. It will be a learning process for me, but my main goal is to make you all feel like this is worth it. I thought I’d do my first couple of posts here on How Brexit Will Be Reversed, a book I sort of half wrote as I tried to get a publisher involved. For reference, a non-fiction book is generally taken up on the basis of a proposal as opposed to a finished work. In fact, publishers are weirdly pissy about buying something that’s already finished if it’s non-fiction. This is the precise opposite of how they buy novels, where they don’t want to consider anything that isn’t completely finished already. As you’ll see as I go on, the publishing industry is a strange world.

It was in mid-2021 that I decided I wanted to write a book about Brexit. I felt that all of the ones out there already were dated (as an example, Nick Clegg’s How to Stop Brexit. Tricky after it’s happened), or frankly, a little lame and/or lightweight. Having run loads of events during the 2010-2015 parliament on the topic of Britain’s membership of the EU, in Westminster and at party conferences, many of them involving MPs and future leaders of the respective referendum campaigns (I did one in 2013 with Matthew Elliot as a speaker), I figured I had something unique to say about the intellectual roots of Brexit. This is more important now than ever because understanding what they used to say in 2013 about what Brexit should be like now is key to breaking down their current arguments.