A very interesting account in today's Briefings for Britain on how a Remain/Rejoin narrative was able to gain a good deal of traction by combining and amplifying a number of events focused on the petrol shortage. That rapidly got connected to a shortage of truck drivers which in turn led to denunciations of policies to exclude cheap immigrant labour after Brexit as we saw.
Elements of the shortage for the author (G. Prins) included the recent switch to more ethanol in the mix -- E10 fuel as it is called -- for 'green' reasons which caused temporary problems in stocks, Prins argues. These minor shortages were then amplified in social media panics driven by a deliberate campaign and Government were slow to resist.
Incidentally, the Daily Mail (!) floated a story, I recall, that the Road Haulage Association's PR Department specifically released a story about panic buying at petrol stations and the person responsible was a notable Remainer -- I'd have to look up that source so I can't rely on it yet.
Prins uses models from cybernetics and psychology to explain how small disturbances can get amplified into major disturbances, which I will leave you to purse. It reminded me a bit of some chaos theory. His is a bit of a conspiratorial account -- he talks of Rejoiner Central and specifies the ubiquitous Gina Miller and Jolyon Maugham, familiar names to those still haunted by the appalling events of the hung Parliament and the High Court interventions in the run-up to the final split with the EU.
He also0 argues that the pressure is now being applied to a rather odd debate about whether the UK should reapply to join the EU Galileo project satellite navigation system like the US GPS from which we were excluded (from the military bits anyway) as a 'third country' if we dared leave the EU. It would introduce EU control through the old backdoor again, of course, and it looks like our 'own' One-Web system might be better anyway.
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