We're asking the passengers to fly the plane

Would you trust patients to run a hospital or children to run a school? You might ask their opinion, but no sensible person would expect them to know what they were doing to improve health outcomes or education results. Those who bothered to get involved might have the best intentions for a while but would soon realise there's a huge amount they don't know about the consequences of their naive actions (or inaction).

What we do in hospitals and schools is employ experts to safeguard and prioritise the interests of patients and students. Those experts (unelected because patients and students don't all have the skills to judge who would be good at it) ultimately report to people who are elected to be accountable for all patients and all students. If they do their jobs badly, they are replaced.

So what would happen if you did ask the patients to run the hospital or students to run the school? What priorities would they have and what would be the consequences? Firstly I suspect that there would be a significant proportion who would understand the objectives of each institution and would immediately realise they needed help to make decision before they changed anything. But there would also be plenty of patients and students who wouldn't understand about the consequences of their decisions and would only learn those lessons the hard way. Their objectives would be short-term and probably naive. Self-interest would probably prevail. But the rules say the majority get their way. In hospitals and schools there might be fatalities and exam failures, but ultimately one might hope the patients and students would realise they need those experts.

But with Brexit, there's no second chance. No oops moment.

Tragically we have asked the British people to fly the plane and next Thursday they have to land it. If it crashes, all we can do is blame the idiots who asked them to fly it, and the passengers who ignored the pilot's advice and thought they knew better.

And if you need more advice, you must listen to this expert: Prof Michael Dougan an EU Law at Liverpool University

Comments

Phillips screws - yes I'm angry about them too

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Would we pay more for their stuff?

I'm confused. Brexiters argue the Germans, Italians and French will still want to sell us their cars, so continued free trade with the UK is in their best interests. But we'll have to negotiate this (with an EU unwilling to make leaving easy) by threatening to make their cars more expensive for British people to buy. We'll do this because WE need to make imports more expensive to try to restore our balance of payments. Are Brits prepared to pay more for their Audis, Fiats and Renaults in order to make British cars more appealing, or do Brexiters want to pay more in order to punish them for taxing our insurance and banking products? Either way, imports will cost more. While in the EU, we buy their cars because we like the choice and don't want our own government to tax them. Indeed it would be better for British car manufacturing if we went back to the good old days of being encouraged to buy cheaper British cars (made by foreign owned factories). Is that what Brexite

Addictions. Porn, Drugs, Alcohol and Sex. Don't prevent it, make it safer.

In 1926 New York, during Prohibition, 1,200 people were poisoned by whiskey containing small quantities of wood alcohol (methanol). Around 400 died, the rest were blinded. The methanol they drank was in the moonshine they had bought illegally. In fact it had been added by law to industrial ethanol in order to make it undrinkable. Prohibition existed to protect everyone from the 'evils of the demon drink'. However, people still wanted to enjoy alcohol. So bootleggers bought cheap industrial alcohol and attempted to distill it to remove the impurities the state had added, but the process wasn't regulated. The state was inadvertently responsible for the suffering - although it was easy for them to blame the bootleggers and to justify escalating the war. This didn't stop the bootleggers. In fact it forced them to become more violent to protect their operations, and even less cautious about their production standards. Volumes of illicit alcohol, and therefore proportionat

Grombles

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