Matthew Goodwin says there are five big advantages to having left the EU. Unsurprisingly, they are all rubbish. Here’s my breakdown of why every one of them falls apart under inspection
Debunking the latest round of Brexiter myths can get tiring. That’s the whole point of what the Brexiters do, in fact - spout rubbish in order to wear people like me down, sending another avalanche of dreary bullshit that has to be shown up for the tissue of nonsense that it is, hoping one day that the only people still complaining about Brexit will be the Brexiters themselves.
Matthew Goodwin has anointed himself recently as a sort of Grand Poobah of the intellectual Brexiters. Therefore, taking what he says on the matter seriously is a perfectly valid way of debunking Brexit myths. I say this because Brexiters constantly accuse me of having a go at ordinary Joe pro-Brexit types on social media, a sort of “pick on someone your own size” type of thing, which seems to go against their “Everyone who voted Brexit knows exactly what they voted for” line, as well as the whole “We’re tired of experts” shtick. By their logic, shouldn’t we take the word of @Brexitrulzlol5824390584 to be just as valid as anyone else’s?
Anyhow, this week, Matthew came up with five Brexit advantages he thinks will shame the Remoaners into silence. They are all rubbish and as such, easily debunked. I would give him points for not mentioning either the vaccine rollout or Ukraine - but he later went on to expand his list to ten benefits, most of the extra items just covering the Ukraine and vaccines nonsense, plus some sovereignty boiler plate and a mention of losing freedom of movement, the latter of which is definitely not a benefit.
So, here we go, I’ll take each of them on, one at a time, as usual:
Brexit strengthened our representative democracy
Come on, Matt, seriously? It’s this sort of thing that makes me wonder if Professor Goodwin is simply taking the piss. We’ve had four changes of prime minister in the seven years since the Brexit referendum. Our representative democracy has almost fallen over several times in that period - ah yes, Matt and his buds chime in with here, but so much of that is down to Remainer MPs trying to foil the referendum! Except, that only weakens the “strengthened our representative democracy” argument even further. In a representative democracy, MPs run on a platform they want to see enacted and then if they win, they vote for this platform to become law. We elect MPs to do what they say they are going to do on the tacit assumption that this is what they believe in.
The result of the EU referendum created a clash between direct democracy (the referendum result) and representative democracy (the will of parliament). Now, you can make the argument that the referendum result trumps parliament’s will, but you cannot then turn around and say that representative democracy was “strengthened” as a result. It was directly weakened by the referendum and Brexiters cheered that on.
This is before we get into how much the ministerial code has deteriorated since 2016, or how we ended up in a situation in which a score of Tory ex-ministers publicly called into question the result of a parliamentary scrutiny committee hearing (i.e., questioned the very will of the House of Commons), or again, the four fucking prime ministers we’ve had to endure since the referendum came and went, the last one with the weakest mandate yet.
Brexit has given us trade deals without having to pay the EU
Since the first argument of Matthew’s was so spurious, I’m going to try my best to engage with the substance of this one. I suppose because we managed to roll over the terms of 67 of the trade deals we had with countries when we were still an EU member, this means we’re all set now and don’t need to “pay the EU” any longer since we have all the trade deals we really need. Except, we got them all by being a member in the first place, which means we did technically pay for them.
Add to that the fact that we are still looking for trade deals, which means we still need them, presumably. And the deals we’ve managed to get outside of the EU so far have been vastly inferior to the ones we got as a member. Even Tory ministers involved in striking these deals agree (See George Eustice and his comments on the Australia deal). The UK appears so far to be fairly awful at striking trade deals; using them as evidence that Brexit was a good idea is extremely ill-advised.
It allowed us to make new deals not possible in the EU
This is almost exactly the same point as “benefit” number two above. It’s like Matthew could only think of four supposed benefits at the time and so he just slipped one in that was a photocopy of another and hoped we wouldn’t notice. Word to Professor Goodwin: if you’re going to try this trick again, don’t put the ones that are pretty much exactly the same right on top of each other. Makes it easier for the lay person to spot. Sort of like when you want to expand your list of five Brexit benefits to ten and throw in the Ukraine and vaccine rollout horseshit combined with several iterations of what amounts to “sovrentee, init.”
Allowed us to have a points based immigration system
Matthew’s biggest gripe at the moment is how immigration has got out of hand since Brexit, with non-EU immigration skyrocketing and everyone in “real Britain”, you know outside of the New Elite wokerati, thinking this is a terrible thing. Well, the fact that we have a points based immigration system now has a huge amount to do with this issue.
Countries that establish a points-based system tend to have higher immigration. This only makes sense - creating a points-based immigration system is like putting a “help wanted” sign out in front of your country. Sure, the whole point is to attract a certain kind of immigrant - highly educated, highly skilled, likely to earn a high salary - but a points-based system makes it simpler for this type of immigrant to come to the country in question. It also makes it much more difficult for countries that then want to limit immigration to turn them away at any point, at least without doing away with the points-based system.
More than that, the points-based immigration system we have implemented in this country post-Brexit is mostly going to attract global, citizen of nowhere, super-educated liberal types of the kind Matthew is always talking down. Points-based systems tend to limit the migration of working-class, salt of the earth, socially conservative people, the kind that you’d think Matthew would want to see more of coming here. So, this points-based immigration system Professor Goodwin is touting as a “Brexit benefit” seems to be the cause of most of what he is currently railing against every week.
Brexit allowed us to align with faster growing parts of the world
Professor Goodwin has ended his list of five (four, really) Brexit benefits with one almost as ridiculous as the one he started with. I can only imagine he is referring to CPTPP with this one, although the use of the word “align” is interesting here.
The whole, explicit point of leaving the EU and signing up to something like CPTPP instead is that we don’t have to “align” with anyone. CPTPP is thin and light touch, mostly dealing with lowering goods quotas across the signatory states. This is in contrast to joining the EU, which requires a high level of “alignment” of laws and regulation. This makes me wonder: doesn’t Matthew using the word “align” here give away the game that even signing up to relatively light-touch trading arrangements such as CPTPP involve losing some measure of sovereignty?
Anyhow, this isn’t a Brexit benefit because we’re not aligning with anyone on anything. Except the EU, ironically enough, slowly but surely in order to continue trading with our closest neighbours.
If this is the best the smartest guy in the Brexiter stable can do in terms of laying out the benefits of Brexit, I’d start preparing for the day we rejoin the EU because it could be coming faster than anyone currently believes.
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VG as ever. Not exactly to do with Brexit but when you talked about "strengthening our democracy" I couldn't but think of a couple of recent news items - 1)that an MP and former Tory leader thinks that it's OK to incite criminal damage (against ULEZ cameras) and that no action has been taken against him - compare and contrast the treatment of climate protesters, whatever you might think fo the merits of their case and 2)the way that the Right came out against the principle of free speech, which they profess to hold so dear, in wanting to suppress the display of EU flags at the Last Night of Proms and/or censor the TV images thereof.
It strikes me, as with NT's demolition of Goodwin, that the hard Right know that they have lost the arguments and are basically resorting to Franco-style suppression and the evisceration of democratic processes
Matthew Goodwin is regularly posting on YouTube as part of a campaign attempting to put an intellectual spin on his very right wing socially conservative views, such as:
The replacement theory. Border controls on migrants being insufficient. A roundabout way of saying that native UK people are being replaced from the workforce too rapidly and people don't like it, or are justified in not liking it.
Goodwin does not temper these views by examining the practical aspect of finding more native UK workers to fill vacancies, or what it would take to raise the birth rate and educate and train millions more and how long that might take, i.e. 25 years. It might be tweaked at the edges but is basically not going to change in this ageing society . Still less why migrants are somehow an inferior method of filling vacancies? They are actually not. They broaden our horizons and have hugely improved our food on offer. Thank god for that. British cuisine was destroyed by 2 world wars, shortages and rationing and now the migrant and fusion cuisine has put it back on the map. Music too has benefited hugely.
For a long time we were told by these nationalists that migrants were keeping wages down. Yet in the recent years when 1.3m EU workers returned to the continent causing shortages of workers in most sectors, real wages have been falling behind CPI inflation by record amounts since the mid 19th Century and RPI by more. The Tories who told us they wanted a high wage economy, kept public sector wages down even lower. To the civil servants who worked around them and implemented their policy they provided a 1.8% rise at a time when food was rising at 18%.
Goodwin blathers on about trade deals and taking back control. The irrelevant CPTPT pacific deal involves secretive courts making decisions that Britain would have no hand in. We had inputs into the EU at every level and still had to pass laws through the UK parliament. Parliament no longer debates trade deals. This Pacific deal also makes it effectively impossible for the UK to take private business in public ownership. So much for sovereignty.
The Aus deal was so one sided that the perpetrators took to their TV airwaves to gloat about how they had pulled fast one over Britain and so couldn't believe it that they contacted Truss ( Foreign Sec.) to ask for even more and got given it immediately!
Prof Matt Goodwin contrived to claim that the new establishment are lefties running Uni’s, public sector & arts related business such as publishing, out of line with ordinary people. They have a limited influence but are not the real establishment. The real establishment are royalty, lords, MPs, Tory donors, Corporate boards, newspapers owners (mostly foreigners/overseas), Russian oligarchs, property magnates, finance/investors exporting billions with fake patriotic pretence (Mogg & Redwood MPs) . These people have the real power. Tories take your taxes and cut your services, then cover for themselves by trying to blame penniless refugees fleeing oppression, protected by International law set up by Winston Churchill and British lawyers after WW2.
What Goodwin has done is to attract every racist xenophobe and give them acres of YouTube comments to exchange their vile views in a forum with a veneer of respectability and academia, with no skin heads, salutes or mock uniforms in sight.
Unlike Goodwin, at least the skinheads who used to throw bricks at me walking home from Grammar school in a national front stronghold of Debden, Loughton, Essex in the late 70’s were at least sincere in their vileness.