I have seen a lot of moping around on Twitter! But it seems to me that you can’t spell Brexit without exit, and there is normally something on the other side of an exit. Although, in this case, not a door handle. I have written down some of the silver-linings of Brexit that my fellow over-educated metrosexuals seem to have missed because, frankly, they don’t seem to be as educated and metrosexual as I am.
Housing
We can stop listening to dog-whistling right-wingers who blame low wages and cultural mongrelisation on foreign workers and, instead, return to the more acceptable business of listening to liberals who blame the housing crisis on foreign skyscraper-builders. A great first few sentences for a Guardian column on this topic this would be:
My flat white was served this morning by a barista named Pavel, and cooled in the dark shadow of the Shard. The threat of the ‘foreign worker’ was always illusory and will soon be gone; but the threat of the foreign investor looms large, and will mark our cities in ways that can never be undone. Join me in saying “British capital gains, for British columnists!” [continues for 800 words]
Financial markets
The threat to financial markets has been exaggerated by the usual coterie of johnny-come-lately know-nothing alarmists. My investment portfolio - 25% bitcoin; 25% gold; 25% nails; 25% Chinese cement - has outperformed the broader market and made me a wealthy man.
I also have a residual holding in Amalgamated Spats that, in the post-BHS, post-Brexit world, I expect to emerge as the major spats supplier to independent-minded Brits . Expect them to launch a friction-free subscription service sometime in 2016Q4.
The productivity puzzle
The referendum has been a real distraction from getting economic productivity back on an upward trajectory. Britain only has one real labour market incentive, and it’s a great one: did your parents buy property in the South East 25 years ago? Without the dead wood of EU regulation, we’ll be able to focus on that labour market incentive with laser-like precision.
But, ideally, we’d go a lot further than that. The qualification of owning a house in the South East isn’t doing enough to guarantee that the best people move into the most skilled jobs, thereby improving productivity. Instead, what we have seen is that the people with the best accents are getting the most skilled jobs. This is obviously a big improvement on the 1970s (gross) but to do even better we could take a lesson from government and work on getting the people from the best schools into the top posts.
As a transitional measure, the government should announce two policies:
- A jobs guarantee for graduates of Eton and the Dragon School.
- The merger of the television programmes The Apprentice and Who Do You Think You Are?
An economy and government finally run by the best of the best? That’s really something to cheer the soul!
Living through history
Anyone who loves history, also loves living through history. What is a constitutional convention? No one really knows, but we might get several. The great thing about momentous events in British history (e.g. burying a skeleton in a car park) is that we are treated to Benedict Cumberbatch reading one of his poems about it.
We also get to read columns by Niall Ferguson and Simon Schama - the greats! - that really fill in the details and set Britain in a truly global context. I expect that we will see Benedict Cumberbatch reading a lot of poems in the next few years, and I’m very excited to hear what Profs Ferguson and Schama have to say about it. Will the constitutional convention emerge as western civilisation’s eighth ‘killer app’? To what extent will the UKIP hangers on at the constitutional convention conjure up the very ghosts of Hogarth’s Gin Lane? I don’t know yet but I’m super psyched to learn about this from the intellectual heavyweights.
Conclusion
To sum up, Brexit has come as a terrible shock to a lot of us. But I have noticed that, just as the word Brexit contains the word exit, so it contains the words be and rite. Anyone who appreciates the work of Professor Robert Langdon as much as I do will agree that this is very significant. The best thing that we can do now is look for those silver linings and learn how to be ‘be rite’ with Brexit.