During the referendum, the Remain camp broke down into three broad groups when it came to truthfulness and fear. Many genuinely believed that a Leave vote would cause doom and disaster on every front. Others believed some of it, and were willing to over-egg the pudding in an attempt to win. A few didn’t care whether any of it was true or not, but were happy to deploy any old fear if they thought it would serve their ideological commitment to ever closer union with the EU.
Now that we have indeed voted Leave, we get to see to what extent those warnings were true. Ought we to be retreating to our cellars with a stock of bottled water and canned food, or are there signs that all those warnings were in fact either untrue or ill-founded?
Today’s news contains three more reasons to be cheerful:
For a long time, Eurosceptics were accused of being fantasists – wildly over-optimistic about the prospects of an independent Britain. Now it seems that the opposite was in fact the case: those who advocated staying in the EU on the basis that Britain could not manage its own affairs were being unrealistically negative.
Is everything guaranteed to go our way? No – it never is. Are there risks in the world, and challenges in the British economy? Of course – but it was always thus. Will it be hard work, running the country democratically, accountably and openly? Yes. But it can be done, and done well. Having some confidence in our potential is the first step.