Nice Guardian column by Rafael Behr:

We conspired to hold a referendum on leaving the EU without a serious conversation about what the EU even is, let alone what it does. Then, a year later, we got through a general election campaign with little mention of Europe at all. Another year has passed and, despite the urgency of the article 50 clock running out, politics still manages to distract itself with arguments other than the only one worth having, which is this: given what we now know about Brexit that we didn’t know then, should we still do it?

That is not the question on which May and Corbyn would dwell in a televised debate (regardless of the channel). It isn’t a question that troubles hardline Tory backbenchers running up and down Westminster corridors in pursuit of letters of no confidence in their leader. It isn’t a question that can be answered by publication of the attorney general’s legal advice on the withdrawal agreement, prised piecemeal by opposition parties from the clenched fist of government. That isn’t to say these things are unimportant. It matters if Geoffrey Cox QC advises that the Irish “backstop” is a trapdoor to perpetual regulatory subordination. But it matters only as confirmation of a structural downside to Brexit that we know already – the imbalance of power between a bloc of 27 states and one quitter.

Interesting Bloomberg column Clive Cook:

The crucial point is straightforward. Britain needed to seek a compromise that traded off degrees of access to Europe’s single market against degrees of effective sovereignty and democratic accountability. Remaining in the EU involves close-to-frictionless trade with the other members combined with seriously diminished democratic self-government. A clean Brexit, leaving the U.K.’s relationship with Europe akin to Canada’s with the U.S., involves short- and possibly long-term economic losses combined with a stronger form of self-government.

Reasonable people can disagree about where to be on that spectrum. A deal of the form May first had in mind — a middle point between a narrow free-trade agreement and full access to the single market — could well have worked. But the final form of May’s exit agreement finds no such point of balance.

Compared with remaining in the EU, it entails substantial economic losses and diminished, not enhanced, democratic accountability. The only significant policy question over which Britain gains new control is immigration. On almost every other issue where the EU has competence, Britain, thanks to the so-called backstop on Northern Ireland, will be indefinitely hemmed in –- while losing any say in what the EU chooses to do. On a scrupulously unzealous assessment, this is less self-government than Britain currently has as a member of the EU. It isn’t a compromise, it’s a capitulation.

Simon Wren-Lewis on Osborne & Co:

You do not need experts, or you are only interested in experts who are one of us, because you have an ideology to guide you to the truth, or you are suspicious of any expertise that does not share your ideology. One of us is one who shares an ideology, in this case the ideology of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism wants as much as possible to be organised as a market. If that includes democracy itself (democracy is just a market for votes) then there is nothing preventing you employing all the tricks of advertising, preferably not encumbered by any regulators. Politics becomes the art of selling, rather than the assessment of policy.

Why do I call the period after 2010 in the US and UK neoliberal overreach, as opposed to straight neoliberalism in the 1980s? After all there are some similarities in the UK between the two periods. Both Osborne and Thatcher started their terms in government with economic experiments that went against received economic wisdom. Both tried austerity (a fiscal contraction in a recession). I don’t want to minimise the harm Thatcher did to parts of the country, but her austerity was temporary [2] and the monetarist experiment was quickly abandoned, with the result that the recovery was only delayed by a year or two and the economy in aggregate eventually recovered in the true sense of the term. In contrast the slow recovery in the UK, US and Europe since 2010 seems to have had permanent and large negative effects. An interesting question is how much this difference between the two periods in the UK reflects different degrees of control over the media.

But the main reason I call what happened after 2010 overreach is that the neoliberalism of both Reagan and Thatcher was in many ways popular, and so there was less need to dress policies up as something they were not. In 2010 there was no popular demand for a reduction in the size of the state, so it required a form of subterfuge: what I call deficit deceit. Tight targets for immigration made no sense for neoliberals who wanted to reduce red tape for firms, but it was useful as a way to deflect anger over austerity and win votes.

A better way to describe Brexit than heart over head is the triumph of ideology over knowledge. Neoliberalism isn’t the only ideology behind Brexit. There are elements of English nationalism that William Davies discusses in his piece noted above and Anthony Barnett discusses so well in the Lure of Greatness. But the disinterest in facts or experts and the absence of shame in telling whatever lie is required to get what they want is very much part of what I call neoliberal overreach. To those to whom evidence based policy is natural they appear fools, but they know exactly what they are doing and in terms of deception they are rather good at it.