PRECEDENTS

 The decision-making process is comprised of several parts, of which expert opinion is but one. This applies to Brexit. It is the nature of experts that they are wrong, and the advice they give should be restricted to technical issues. Different experts will arrive at different opinions. There are often different areas of technical expertise – such as economic, legal and constitutional.

Then there is the track record of the experts. How often are they right? Then there is the risk factor. What are the potential adverse consequences of things going wrong? Then there is common sense. Then there is what do people actually want?

Importantly, there is the judgement of those making the decision. Are they wise and objective, or are they stupid and bigoted?

Of great help, is: are there any lessons to be learned from precedents? Have we been in similar situations before? Regarding Brexit, there are lessons to be learnt from precedents. Firstly, the establishment economic experts and a whole variety of vested interests have been consistently wrong. They were not just a little bit wrong. The outcomes, again and again, were to exact opposite to what the experts and vested interests loudly declared they would be. Prime examples are membership of the EU itself and the adoption of the various treaties, membership of the single currency, membership of the ERM and continued membership of the ERM. We were told that membership of the single currency was necessary to avoid economic catastrophe, when in fact the single currency has been an economic catastrophe. Thankfully, the experts and vested interests were ignored and we stayed out.

Secondly, when a change of economic policy was achieved by exiting something damaging, that change had to be forced upon the government of the day. The politicians were unable to take a rational decision to stop harming the country. Both the ejection from the ERM and the exit from the Gold Standard in 1931 demonstrate this.

With the ERM, Britain joined at too high a rate and was set against devaluation. The Major Government was happy to see Britain plunge into a deep recession while interest rates were kept high to defend the value of sterling. In the event, sterling fell though the bottom of its allowable range despite interest rates being increased to 15% (inflation was only 2%). The government was forced out of the ERM as it was unable to keep sterling within it.

With the Gold Standard, Britain joined at too high a rate, deliberately, expecting to force down wages to compensate. With an ongoing trade deficit and a haemorrhage of gold (payments had to be made in gold), the government ran out of gold. The Labour Government borrowed more gold and proposed to introduce tariffs, but Snowden, the Chancellor, was a committed free trader and threatened to resign. Instead, the policy adopted was one of government spending cuts and a policy of deflation – despite the depths of the recession and the high and increasing levels of poverty and unemployment. The Cabinet split and the government fell. A Tory-backed national government was formed and despite another £80million gold being borrowed from France and the USA, spending cuts and tax increases, the outflow of gold continued and at a rate of £2million per day. On the 21^st September 1931 Britain left the Gold Standard.

With both the ERM and the Gold Standard, the establishment experts and vested interests predicted economic catastrophe should Britain leave, and in both cases the result was an economic boom. Helped by the introduction of tariffs, in the 1930s Britain experienced the fastest rate of growth since the industrial revolution.

These lessons need to be applied to Brexit. The scare stories of disaster should be ignored as hysteria and lies. And Britain will have to be forced out. The politicians are not capable of taking the decision to leave, or even implementing the referendum result. They will have to be forced into it.