If even Michel Barnier is having doubts about the EU, we Brexiteers shouldn’t worry about a new study saying we’re dimmer than Remainers
Shortly after the Brexit referendum in 2016, I used to be sitting exterior my favorite pub at a desk subsequent to a group of younger ladies who had been discussing the end result. Suddenly considered one of them shrieked at the high of her voice: ‘I’ve been actually raped by 17 million outdated individuals!’
Thinking this declare extremely inconceivable, I toyed for a second or two with difficult her use of the phrase ‘actually’. But I judged that she wasn’t in the temper for lectures from an ageing pedant on the which means of frequent English phrases.
With emotions working frighteningly excessive at the time, nor did I believe this was the proper second to tell her that I personally had voted to go away the EU – a crime that might presumably have marked me down as a rapist in her eyes.
More than seven years on, the hysteria amongst many who voted Remain seems hardly to have abated. Indeed, I nonetheless really feel barely hesitant about revealing to my metropolitan, middle-class neighbours – medical doctors, lecturers, teachers, promoting execs and civil servants amongst them – that I put my X in the field marked Leave.
It’s true that I have not heard Brexiteers described as rapists since that day exterior the pub. But I’ve misplaced rely of the variety of insults we’ve been subjected to.
Meanwhile, Remainers nonetheless blame Brexit for virtually all our woes – together with those who manifestly don’t have anything to do with it.
We’re senile racists, they inform us, the dregs of society, maniacs of the far Right who’re so profoundly silly that we had been duped into inflicting a calamity on our nation by a mendacious slogan on the aspect of a bus.
Some Remainers – although I hasten to say, in no way all – appear nearly deranged of their contempt for us Brexiteers and their mysterious devotion to an over-bureaucratic, authoritarian, anti-democratic, protectionist buying and selling bloc whose share of world commerce has been shrinking for many years.
To take one instance, simply these days I’ve been studying, and far having fun with, the Slough House sequence of spy thrillers by Mick Herron. I would not declare they’re nice literature (I’ve lengthy given up my decision to enhance myself by sticking to the classics in my semi-retirement). But they’re rattling good yarns, if a bit samey after a whereas, and there are good jokes in them.
One factor that strikes me, nonetheless, is that the arch-villain of the sequence – a mendacity, faux-bumbling, Latin-quoting, far Right-wing politician known as Peter Judd, or PJ – is so clearly an unjust caricature of a sure Boris Johnson, or BJ, that my esteemed colleague, the former PM and figurehead of the Brexit marketing campaign, might absolutely sue if he felt so inclined (which I belief he doesn’t).
As for Brexit itself, Herron can hardly carry himself to put in writing the phrase, preferring to name it ‘the ongoing disaster’ or You-Know-What, in the approach that characters in J. Ok. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels consult with Voldemort as You-Know-Who or He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.
This week a Remain-voting educational from the University of Bath has equipped new ammunition to the Brexit-haters, by claiming to have proven scientifically that those that voted to go away had been extra more likely to be thick than their fellow Remainers.
After testing 3,183 {couples} for his or her cognitive capacity, senior lecturer Chris Dawson and his crew declare this week to have discovered that of the highest-performing 10 per cent, 73 per cent voted Remain in 2016. Of these rating in the backside 10 per cent, solely 40 per cent had been Remainers.
The identical sample was seen – though to a lesser extent – even after components resembling earnings, schooling and age had been taken under consideration. It additionally held true, in order that they inform us, amongst husbands and wives who had voted in reverse methods, with the Remain-voting associate extra more likely to rating larger in these cognitive exams.
(Remainers might draw some consolation from understanding that though Mrs U and I each voted Leave, our votes had been cancelled out by our Eurofanatical sons – or slightly, by the two of the 4 who mustered the vitality to train their votes.)
I do not know about you, however I’m wondering if testing the respective intelligence of Remainers and Brexiteers is an altogether worthwhile use of public funds at a time when the UK is £2.5 trillion in debt. After all, what did the researchers hope to realize, except it was merely to lend a scientific veneer to the acquainted insult: ‘We Remainers are intelligent, and the remainder of you might be silly. So yah boo sucks’?
To be honest to Dawson, he does stress that we must be cautious of studying an excessive amount of into his findings. ‘People shouldn’t get offended with this, or joyful, relying on who they voted for,’ he says.
He is even ready to concede that some who voted for Brexit scored fairly extremely in his exams, saying: ‘This is about variations at a inhabitants degree. If you drew two random individuals who voted Leave or Remain, it says little or no about variations which may exist between these individuals.’ Big of him.
Meanwhile, different scientists level out that even if the study does seem to search out a link between intelligence and voting intentions, this does not imply it is proof of a causal connection. In different phrases, it might’t be claimed that the motive so many people voted to go away was that we weren’t very vivid.
Dawson insists it is important, nonetheless, that solely the cleverest one-third of Leave voters can be classed as extra clever than the common Remainer.
With a hanging lack of scientific objectivity, he provides: ‘We have rising quantities of faux information and it is getting increasingly subtle. This means that one thing we all should reside with is basically the results of individuals having the ability to unfold pretend data and faux guarantees that some individuals simply could not distinguish from actuality.’
If that is not studying an excessive amount of into his personal findings, then I’m wondering what can be. Indeed, is not it fairly as potential that the kind of people that do effectively in cognitive efficiency exams had been extra more likely to put their belief in all these Remainer specialists, with strings of letters after their names, who predicted complete financial collapse if we dared to drag out?
I’m the first to confess that since the vote, the Tories have been painfully sluggish to grab the alternatives afforded by our escape from the graveyard grip of Brussels – not least below the disastrous premiership of Theresa May, who by no means had her coronary heart in Brexit.
That stated, nonetheless, there are encouraging indicators that issues are finally transferring on the financial entrance, with the lengthy sequence of commerce offers, both signed or in the pipeline, which we could not have agreed if we’d stayed in the EU.
Meanwhile, even Michel Barnier, the EU’s former chief negotiator and a as soon as fanatical believer in a federal Europe, now suggests his personal native France wants particular safety from the rulings of the over-mighty and unelected European Court of Justice! So do not inform me every thing is rosy in the EU.
Is even he now coming to grasp that the priceless asset we regained from our withdrawal was a sovereign nation’s proper to a say in how we’re ruled?
Yes, in fact Brexit has raised difficulties for some corporations – not least over the query of the Irish border, which stays unresolved. But companies throughout the nation are getting over the teething troubles of Brexit and adapting efficiently to the new preparations.
As for these catastrophic penalties of withdrawal, so confidently predicted by David Cameron, George Osborne and all these extremely certified individuals at the Treasury, no matter occurred to them? Mass unemployment, widespread civil unrest, an instantaneous double-dip recession – none of this has come to move.
No doubt these specialists would do exceptionally effectively in cognitive efficiency exams. So, too, maybe, would Associate Professor Dawson and his crew of teachers, who’ve toiled so lengthy and onerous to measure the comparative intelligence of Remainers and Brexiteers.
