Losing needles in haystacks

Adorno once said something to the effect that the trouble with politically committed academic writing is that people come to doubt the academic bits, which undermines the whole point. We see this very clearly with Brexit coverage among the Remainers, where some quite good arguments, worthy of further investigation, get lost in all the blather of personal hatred and anxiety.

There have been a couple of examples lately, including a piece which contains some further economic analysis of likely scenarios after Brexit: all of them predict a decline in economic activity, and it would have been worth examining in more detail the assumptions, the definitions,the samples  and so on on which this is all based. However, even I found it hard to read with much enthusiasm because the Guardian itself is so blatantly Remainerish that it made you doubt whether any of the evidence was any more than just banging on and on.

Perhaps the best example turns on the interesting debate sparked by Polly Toynbee about the possibilities for the fishing industry after Brexit. In the middle of Polly's article is an argument that Brexit will not return the control of British waters to British fishermen, because many of the quotas awarded to British fishermen have already been sold to foreign fisheries. Idle and feckless British skippers are partly to blame — 'slipper skippers who found ' it was easier to put their feet up than to fish'. We would have to buy back these quotas, Polly thinks, and this would require substantial funds which makes the prospect as unlikely as Labour being able to renationalise the railways. It would also conflict with the Government's big business agenda.

An interesting debate then ensued in the letters page. One correspondent argued that when we leave the EU, there will be a new system of allocating control over fisheries, which relies upon the old idea of territorial waters, not EU quotas. Furthermore, it was the fault of the EU, not of lazy slipper skippers, that foreigners own British quotas: the EU forbids entirely national ownership of fishing quotas, no doubt part of its general privatisation policy. Subsequent discussion has taken up some of these points, and argued that Westminster also has a role, or that any new system of allocating control would simply reinforce EU quotas.

Overall, this seems quite an important debate and it would have been nice to have had it much earlier. The Guardian must be credited for raising it, but getting into the detail was terribly difficult because the actual argument appeared in the middle of the usual diatribe by P Toynbee which was almost enough to make me keep turning the page. The headline, for example, was

Propaganda delivered the Brexit vote but it can’t land more fish