She also said that she was prepared to walk away from the negotiations if Britain didn’t get what it wanted, in which case the country would crash out of the E.U. with no agreement at all. She said “no deal” was preferable to “a bad deal for Britain.” That language went over well with the Daily Mail and the Sun, but it really amounted to the Prime Minister putting a gun to her head and threatening to shoot. As a negotiating ploy, it failed miserably.
The leaders of the E.U., meanwhile, want to discourage other member countries from following the U.K.’s example, and appear increasingly determined to impose a harsh deal on London.
.. Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, was asked if there was any leeway to reach a friendly arrangement with Britain. “Some things are not for sale,” she said, indicating that the U.K. would not receive any concessions that undermined the free movement of goods and people within the E.U.
Godfather of ‘Brexit’ Takes Aim at the British Establishment
Arron Banks ..
Mr. Banks plowed $11 million of his personal fortune into UKIP and the unofficial Leave.EU campaign and raised an additional $5 million. Though a small figure by American standards, it made him the single biggest political donor in British history.
.. The Brexit win thrilled Donald J. Trump, who saw in that blow to elite complacency and hierarchy a model for his presidential campaign. And it was Mr. Banks who exchanged ideas on tactics with Mr. Trump’s team throughout their campaigns, making visits with Mr. Farage to Trump rallies.
.. “Never apologize,” he said he had told Mr. Trump. “Facts are white noise,” and “emotions rule.”
.. “We realized we were up against the same kind of enemy and we had to play dirty, and we did,” he said in the interview at Old Down Manor, a Gloucestershire estate hotel he owns.
.. Like Mr. Trump, Mr. Banks sees himself as an outsider tearing up what he said was a cozy conspiracy between career politicians and big corporations.
.. Mr. Banks is considering starting and funding a new citizens’ movement, tentatively called Patriotic Alliance, based on the model of Italy’s Five Star Movement
.. Mounting frustration against the Tory government and a Labour Party in disarray has created an opportunity for a political movement that, “like Trump, isn’t left or right but that is radical,” Mr. Banks said.
.. Mr. Banks has always fancied himself something of an outsider, having spent much of his childhood in England but frequently visiting his father, who managed sugar estates in Africa.
.. He was expelled from a second school and never went on to college, instead selling everything from vacuum cleaners to houses. He then got into insurance, where he made his fortune ..
.. . Banks now has business interests based in the tax havens of the Isle of Man and the British Virgin Islands.
.. “When it comes down to it, Brexit and Trump were about identity. Who do you identify with?” he asked, before answering his own question: “I don’t want to be part of some French-German coalition.”
.. It was, however, only after paying for a private poll of 50,000 Britons ahead of the referendum that he and his team realized that immigration, not sovereignty, was the defining issue that would push people to vote to leave.
.. Mr. Banks, like Mr. Trump, is married to a Slav — in his case, Ekaterina Paderina, a Russian, whom the tabloids like to consider a spy
.. “It’s not complicated,” he said emphatically. “You don’t need a business plan. This is where you’re wrong. I’ve operated now 25 years without any business plan, and I’ve done pretty well.”
Why populism should be no surprise
It suggests that we should not find either the Brexit vote or Trump’s election a surprise. Once we recognise that a large proportion of (most?) voters are not that interested and therefore not that informed about politics, and then ask what information these voters actually received from the media, then both Brexit and Trump were quite rational choices.
.. We ask how can half of those who voted in the EU referendum opt for evident self-harm, because we have read that economists think it will be self harm by a margin of 22 to 1. But if all you have seen is he said/she said reporting in the media, it just looks like economists are divided on the issue.
.. In 2015 voters elected a Conservative government because they thought they were more competent at running the economy. They blamed Labour for causing austerity. Pretty well all the evidence suggested the opposite was true. But all most people heard was the Conservative narrative about ‘clearing up the mess’
.. The power of a simple but false narrative is immense: remember most workers had experienced an unprecedented fall their real earnings over this period, yet they still chose to blame Labour for this rather than the global financial crisis and austerity.
Does Prospect Theory explain Trump and Brexit votes?
Prospect Theory systematically describes these changing attitudes towards risk: people are either risk seeking or risk averse depending on whether the stakes are conceived as gains or as losses. This in turn depends on whether the potential consequences of choices are states of affair that are better or worse than some reference point—what is considered ‘normal.’
.. The political discourses of the Trump and Brexit advocates have framed the stakes in terms of losses rather than gains. The slogans “Make America great again” and “Take back control” clearly refer to the lost grandeur of the past. This sets the reference point as a lost state that was much better than the current one. Also, fear mongering is by definition talking about the frightening (negative) state in which we find ourselves. All this motivates citizens to favor risky options: the gains, even if they are unlikely, are so strongly desired that they induce discounting the very likely losses.
.. With Trump and Brexit voters, we face people who, perceiving that they have lost something, are willing to take high risks. Economic frustrations cause risk seeking preferences, which contribute to motivating votes for Trump and Brexit.