The basic premise of the "it's an establishment stitch up" argument is that Britain will be weaker and poorer, but the establishment will end up with a much, much bigger slice of the smaller pie such that they gain overall. It's not clear to me how that's supposed to work though. How is this pie-grab supposed to work as the pie itself shrinks? Some people might manage to pull it off, but the whole establishment class as a group?

Anyway, this whole premise flies in the face of who we know voted overwhelmingly for Brexit - ordinary British voters, many of them up north and from working backgrounds - even as the actual political parties, majority of MPs and most business leaders were arguing against it. The evidence for an establishment stitch up rests on a few very specific data points, like the fact that Jacob Reese Mog and some of Nigel Farage's hedge fund friends have already and will continue to do quite well out of it. They're hardly "The Establishment" as a whole though. They're just some of the people I was talking about trading on volatility, and hardly representative of the financial sector as a whole that is getting screwed over by losing passporting.

The vast majority of the city and other business leaders where asleep at the wheel - what they should have done is had a quiet word with Harry Peirce (MI5) at the club about these dangerous subversives.

I have always wondered how true this is. It is certainly a common claim, but anecdotally I know several small business owners who I am fairly sure voted Leave because they didn't agree with EU-style regulation such as the subject of today's discussion. And this is in the Cambridge area, which overall was literally the most pro-Remain place in the entire country. Most of those people did not talk much about their views on Brexit in public because of the peer pressure, which I think was unfortunate. Even if few minds might have been changed in either direction, it would have been better for the issues to have been properly debated.

This is false, because every time it was presented for a vote Leave won. If the majority were Remain, Brexit would necessarily not have happened.

As for the alleged ordinary voters, what did they want out of it and what are they actually getting out of it?

The Conservatives have a majority and are there any Remainers left in that party - I thought most of them had been purged before the last election?

My MP still has posts on her blog about how ardently pro EU she was and how she believed staying in the EU was the best idea. Not long after the referendum and May coming in, she was fully behind Brexit and ready to do whatever it takes. A lot of Tory MPs will just go with the prevailing wind on everything and this is also how they stay in power because being progressive is not a vote winner in a broadly (small c) conservative country.

And the ones that didn't were purged

Interesting guy, my opinion of him changed (for the better) when I found out he presented a regular Jazz show on the radio.

I'm really not sure about that. I agree that may be the case with some of those ruling individuals. My impression is that Johnson doesn't believe in anything, except his personal interest and profit.

Others in that cabinet, however, really appear to be true believers.

> Others in that cabinet, however, really appear to be true believers.

My impression is that they all have those same beliefs - their personal interest and profit.

(Clarification: I'm exaggerating for rhetorical effect. The UK won't become impoverished or really stop being an advanced-economy, but it's still going to be far poorer (in a total GDP and PPP sense) than it would be had this whole Brexit business never happened.

Debatable. But even if the EU was - or was not - a tightly integrated federated state, I'm far more concerned about the UK withdrawing itself from the world's largest free trade bloc. I see it heading towards either economic protectionism (bad in the long-term) or getting into a race-to-the-bottom (potentially even worse).

That's a strange thing to say. Globalisation is usually criticized as a race to the bottom. The opposite of that is protectionism, which you say is bad. So which one are you in favour of?

Take the UK for example: at the time of its accession to the EU it had a sizeable manufacturing and mining economy. Globalisation directly led to those factories and mines closing, but being in the EU meant the UK could specialise in emerging sectors and immediately export to the rest of the EU for free (e.g. service-sector, information economy, banking, finance, media, etc).

Globalisation and economic-interdependence is also the main driver for world-peace. I’d rather be unemployed because someone in France does my job but cheaper than be fighting in a war against France for some sense of “national pride”.

Globalisation needs a friendlier face, yes. And we need better ways of managing the local negative effects, like better unemployment income for plant closures - but I don’t believe the sentimental negatives in any way outweigh the long-term benefits.

A bit like a supercritical fluid, where transition between liquid and gas occurs spontaneously.

This is much talked about but so far I've only been seeing the opposite. Since brexit, the UK has so far banned fish trawling in the North sea, banned live export of animals, banned the import of fois gras, and created a much more environmentally friendly alternative to the EU's (absolutely atrocious) common agricultural policy.

> lowering regulatory standards

I'd argue that not all regulation is good regulation, e.g. the GDPR

> Lowering taxes

This is could feasibly happen and you could say it already is by looking at the way the tories have further rigged the housing market and stamp duty post-covid. But I fail to see what that has to do with the EU really. I don't know a lot on this subject though.

> undoing workers' rights legislation

I can see this one happening sadly. Am I not right in saying though that a lot of workers rights come from the judiciary, not the government? Example: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-56123668

Brexiteers would see tony martin as a hero.

(Is this another one of those issues where someone is in favour of Brexit because they think the EU prevents something that is nothing to do with them, because they've been lied to by the UK press again?)

Thankfully the armed police have very stringent training in the Uk.

What we can't have is pistols, apart from 20 or so people in the Olympic pistol shooting teams.

Do you know what does help keep the wealthy wealthy? A ready supply of cheap labour from outside the UK.

Many leading brexit proponents are rich people who made their money from the collapse of the soviet union and have assets largely outside the UK. One conspiracy theory is that they are attempting to crash the UK economy in order to buy the dip, make money from shorts and the sell off of state assets.

Another conspiracy theory is that brexit has an ideological basis in the idea of the soverign individual - related to the idea of the randian hero, the idea is that as states weaken in power, rich people will be able to transcend citizenship and attain some kind of libertarian utopia where they can do what ever they want. One of the leading brexiteers dad wrote a book about it which apparently has some following, but maybe people are just surprised that right wing politicians want a smaller state.

There is also an idea that the UK and its dependencies (e.g. virgin islands) are a tax haven. A lot of brexit money came from US activist billionaires and hedge funds, but a lot of it came from very rich russians who fled tot he UK in the 1990s with huge amounts of money that Russia say was stolen visa corruption and other criminality. The theory is that brexit was a response to EU money laundering and tax evasion rules that would have linked these rich criminals to their money to its sources, leaving them open to russian legal challenge. The theory is that for those people, brexit was a means to escape the net.

In my opinion, the role these factors played is probably overstated - brexit was primarily a backlash against globalisation and change, and a protest against the UK status quo by parts of the population that didn't believe they benefited enough from it, much like the election of Trump in the US.