Arise, Sir Larry, demands the Nation

For some extraordinary reason, the New Year's Honours List has once again omitted the sainted L Elliott, lone sane voice at the Graun. What a lonely furrow that man has been ploughing!. Here he is:

it is clear that the UK has deep, structural economic problems despite – and in some cases because of – almost half a century of EU membership. Since 1973, the manufacturing base has shrivelled, the trade balance has been in permanent deficit, and the north-south divide has widened. Free movement of labour has helped entrench Britain’s reputation as a low-investment, low-productivity economy. Brexit means that those farmers who want their fruit harvested will now have to do things that the left ought to want: pay higher wages or invest in new machinery....The part of the economy that has done best out of EU membership has been the bit that needed least help: the City of London. Each country in the EU has tended to specialise: the Germans do the high-quality manufactured goods; France does the food and drink; the UK does the money. 

it is equally obvious there are big problems with the EU as well: slow growth, high levels of unemployment, a rapidly ageing population. The single currency – which Britain fortunately never joined – has failed to deliver the promised benefits.

those predicting Armageddon for the UK imagine the EU to still be Germany’s miracle economy – the Wirtschaftswunder – of the 1960s. The reality is somewhat different. It is Italy, where living standards are no higher than they were when the single currency was introduced two decades ago. It is Greece, forced to accept ideologically motivated austerity in return for financial support. The four freedoms of the single market – no barriers to the movement of goods, services, people and capital – are actually the four pillars of neoliberalism.

Leaving the EU means UK governments no longer have anywhere to hide. They have economic levers they can pull – procurement, tax, ownership, regulation, investment in infrastructure, subsidies for new industries, trade policy – and they will come under pressure to use them.

Many on the remainer left accept the EU has its faults, but they fear that Brexit will be the start of something worse: slash and burn deregulation that will make Britain a nastier place to live.

This, though, assumes that Britain will have rightwing governments in perpetuity.

By contrast the sentimental conservatism and ability only to parrot old stuff of the Observer comes out well in this

the agreement that Boris Johnson struck with the European Union on Christmas Eve is no political triumph, no diplomatic feat. It will one day surely be regarded as one of the greatest-ever deceits inflicted on the British electorate. 

First there are the costs that will be measured in pounds and pence. This trade deal is unique in erecting rather than eliminating barriers to trade [export trade to the EU that is] . Goods will be subject to costly new customs and regulatory checks[no tariffs or quotas though] . Services – which make up 80% of the British economy – do not even get a look in. The economic consequences will be profound: the Office for Budget Responsibility has forecast that in the long term [ha!], this kind of deal will reduce Britain’s long-run GDP by 4%,[Briefings for Brexit has a good piece on this --as usual, it depends how you calculate GDP]  dwarfing the long-run costs of the pandemic.

Then a shift of ground, not surprisingly, back to the vaguer and loftier stuff that Arts graduates feel more at home with:

But, as we wrote in 2016 [it didn't work then either] , the EU was always much more than an economic project. It was an idealistic undertaking to prevent the continent ever again being racked by war [on their soil anyway]. Decades later, we live in a world marked by new types of instability. The biggest global challenges we face – the climate crisis, global pandemics, international tax avoidance on an eyewatering scale – can be tackled only through nation states acting in concert, rather than alone.

This, together with the fact that we live in a globalised world where the most successful countries choose regulatory alignment in order to facilitate trade, puts paid to the isolationist and old-fashioned notions of national sovereignty trumpeted by the small-minded politics of the Leave campaign.

Oh no! We will lose influence

generation after generation of politicians have shaped the EU from the inside. This deal will diminish the UK’s global influence not just from the perspective of our national interest but in terms of our wider international responsibilities as one of the world’s richest liberal democracies.

A few contradictory views about democracy and political attitudes:

The British public is far more pragmatic than the right of the Conservative party: a citizens’ assembly in 2017 suggested that people were prepared to accept free movement of people in order to minimise the economic costs of Brexit...]Yet]...the  country has been governed by a party captured by an unholy alliance of populists and hard-right ideologues. The Vote Leave campaign misled the public by spreading racist dogwhistles about immigration and by misusing official statistics to promise that Brexit would deliver a huge boost to the NHS [still there!]. These lies were endorsed by politicians like Boris Johnson and Michael Gove who both surely knew that an honest case for Brexit was not strong enough to win a popular vote...crass sloganeering has substituted for responsible government. 

The citizen's assembly, incidentally, is described via the link and can be examined here  It's not bad -- but very small. It consisted of either 50 or 'around 45' citizens selected rigorously and 'at random' while 'reflecting the diversity of the UK population' -- ie a stratified sample --drawn within a YouGov sample. They reflected diversity in demographic terms mostly, although one factor, of unknown weight, was whether they voted Leave or Remain (or reported they had). They met over two weekends and discussed the issues --unsurprisingly, they evidently found themselves compromising.  The views of those 50 people were not the result of being misled, of course. The Observer clearly thinks their views should outweigh the views of the whole electorate and the Parliamentary process.

Talking of crass sloganeering...

... great cost to people’s personal freedoms: to make a life, to study, to start a business or to fall in love in another country....This hard Brexit will also deepen rifts within the union. Most immediately, it will give succour to the cause of Scottish independence

Eric will never love Juliette because he will have to go to all the bother of getting a visa if he wants to stay in France longer than 30 days in any 90 to woo her.

As for Scots nattery --surely the Observer will oppose? Didn't it say just now that the way forward was not nationalism but shared sovereignty?

And hope, always hope... We shall overcome...We have the moral victory...

there surely lies a better, brighter future for Britain that will one day come to pass.