The 75 Brexit Benefits: A Reckoning Begins
Why I’m taking on a think tank, a pseudonym, and an entire decade of political myth-making - one “benefit” at a time.
Since getting back from South Africa last week, I’ve been struggling a little bit with thinking about what I want to write about.
I’m sick to the damned back teeth of writing about Farage and Reform. Writing about the mess of contradictions and cognitive dissonance that is our current government (breakfast clubs, workers rights, two-child-benefit-cap-scrap - good / anti-migrant rhetoric, weakness in narrative, weird budget - bad) makes me depressed, the Tories are completely irrelevant and I’m just not as linked into the culture wars as I once was since telling Twitter, quite politely, to fuck right off.
Until Sunday night, when I became aware of a new book, and suddenly found myself staring at a genuinely interesting opportunity - a rare one. An opportunity that made me sit up and go “oh, this could actually be a something I might be meant to be doing.”
The book in question is The 75 Brexit Benefits. It was published in September this year by the Bruges Group and was written by an author writing under the pseudonym1 “Gully Foyle” - and if the title alone wasn’t enough to have my left-eyebrow slowly rise to attention, the foreword for this tome was written by none other than Sir John Redwood, which, quite honestly, should tell you almost everything about what I’m about to get myself into.
Now, this is something that I don’t say lightly, but Sir John is one of the most ideologically consistent, economically misleading and rhetorically slippery politicians ever to be produced by conservatism in the United Kingdom.
He is the politician of that type that could be standing right inside a building in full conflagration, calmly tell you that the flames are really a sign of national renewal and then write a Telegraph column about how British growth is being strangled by oxygen regulation.
The man has spent decades promoting policies that directly benefit the financial sector while at the same time presenting himself as the archetype of a humble patriot who is simply on a god-sent patriot who is merely setting the record straight. Redwood has an exceptionally interesting history - filled with lucrative side hustles, numerous ideological entanglements and a rather long track record of treating evidence as a decorative accessory rather than a constraint of any sort.
He is, without question, the very last person who should be framing what should count as a “benefit” or “freedom” for our country - which is pretty much exactly why he’s the perfect person for the Bruges Group to wheel out as their sage and beyond-reproach elder.
And while we’re mentioning the Bruges Group, that’s yet another set of alarm bells ringing when it comes to 75 Benefits of Brexit. If you had told me that a book had been published by a Tufton Street outfit, my assumption wouldn’t be fiction or non-fiction - it would be pure campaign output. This think-tank is not an organisation which can easily be linked to a good relationship with the truth. They exist, and always have existed for one purpose and one purpose only - to create narratives and to shape public opinion.
Which in the sequence of eyebrow raises, brings me to the author who has written the book under the pseudonym of “Gully Foyle” - a character from a science fiction novel by Alfred Bester, about a man who can teleport through sheer belief. Which is, quite honestly, pretty apt for this exercise, because belief and faith is doing a helluva lot of heavy lifting in the arguments that are made in 75 Benefits of Brexit2.
Mr Foyle is, in his way, well known - he has been posting these “Brexit Benefits” on Twitter for years3. He’s been doing so aggressively, in all caps and with a discipleship of accounts that flood anyone who dares to question or contextualise his claims - and now it appears he has the institutional backing of a right-wing think tank with decades of experience and infrastructure for propaganda and, presumably, a fairly healthy promotional budget.
In rather stark contrast, I, on the other hand, have a second-hand MacBook, about a thousand google Chrome tabs, whatever is left of my ever-thinning patience4, and - pending a pretty big announcement hopefully later this week - potentially a metric shit tonne5 more time from February onwards.
What I also have, dear reader, is you - and a small circle of experts who I can call on for help. But, this is still going to be, by design, a pretty lopsided fight. Mr Foyle has, it now appears, the backing of the political establishment and a media ecosystem that is always eager to platform any type of content with even a whiff of “Brexit Good” stamped on it.
So, here’s the plan.
Over the coming six or so months, I’m going to write seventy five articles - an article for each “benefit” listed in the book. Each published piece will look at a chapter and its claims made in the book and examine a few things - what it was designed to evoke, what the evidence actually says, how the narrative fits into the broader propaganda machine and where the real world consequences actually fall.
I’m not keen on this being a dunking project of any sort - I honestly don’t have the appetite, time or ego for something like that. I want this to be something just a bit more careful, serious and - hopefully - a bit more useful.
Because the fundamental issue I have with 75 Benefits of Brexit isn’t just that many of its claims are incorrect - it’s that the framework that underpins it all is, I’m sorry to say, dishonest. Foyle’s book starts from the presumption that any post-Brexit change is automatically a benefit, which means that it instantly departs from the realm of analysis and jumps straight into the realm of storytelling instead, and the issue with this, in our modern world, is that the myth-making that he embarks on is more powerful than ever.
Myth-making has become how people start to remember things that never really happened and how nations are able to rewrite their own missteps and disappointments into victories, regardless of cost.
The goal of my project in countering this is to be the antidote to that. I don’t want to embark on a loud rebuttal, but a detailed record - something that future readers can look back on and say: “Ah, okay, I see - that’s what really happened, here is the evidence, here is the context, here is the cost and here is how that particular narrative was constructed.”
It’s also at this point where I’m going to acknowledge (with a small gulp) that this is going to be an absolutely massive project6 - one that will take a fair bit of time, a lot of energy and no small amount of research - and I would like to, at this stage, extend an invite.
If you are one of my readers and you are an economist, a trade lawyer, a fisheries analyst, a political scientist, a constitutional scholar, a border systems specialist an environmental law expert or someone who works within the industries that these “benefits” have supposedly happened in, and you’re willing to collaborate, advise or simply sanity check sections as I write them, please get in touch with me.
I will, of course, be reaching out to people myself (I am an expert in health and sarcasm7, and that will only take me so far), but if you do have any of the expertise available that would strengthen this body of work, I would really be genuinely grateful for your work.
And I think lastly I would like to stress - this project I’m taking on isn’t about proving Mr Foyle wrong. It’s about building a reference point - a resource and proper counterweight - to a book that will otherwise be cited in any number of bad faith arguments and debates for years to come. And if the Bruges Group can spend multiple decades shaping public discourse in this country with a confidence that borders on delusion, then the least I can do is spend a couple of months pulling together something that’s grounded, credible, accessible and, most importantly, based on facts, not narratives.
This is a big project - bigger than is probably sensible, sane or reasonable - and if you’d like to help me get through all seventy-five “benefits” with my sanity at least slightly intact, a paid subscription really does make a difference. But truly: only if you can, and only if you want to.
I take no issue with Mr Foyle using a pseudonym - I can hardly say anything considering that about 6,200 of you know me merely as “The Bear.”
I will mention here that as someone who was raised to be religious but subsequently got excommunicated for daring to love my husband, I respect spiritual commitment to an extent. I just don’t think it belongs in economic and structural analysis.
I have had many a post responded to with a link to his thread of 75 Brexit benefits - and I’ve almost always ignored them.
And hair.
Recognising here that a “metric shit tonne” is not an actual unit of measurement, I think in this context it can be understood to be the equivalent of “more time than any sensible person really should dedicate to Brexit again.”
It’s similar to that small gulp that people make when they realise that they’ve just agreed to move a sofa up three flights of stairs without checking whether it will actually fit or not.
Which, to be fair, are two disciplines with a surprising amount of overlap when it comes to dealing with political messaging in the 21st century about the NHS.
Willy and I will happily dive face first into whatever you need researched. It is our full-time hobby and frankly the only thing stopping us chain-drinking/smoking and starting a small, principled riot.
This is probably from before your time in the U.K. Mr Bear. John Redwood was, at one time, regarded as one of the more intelligent members of the Conservative party and a potential leader. He was sometimes referred to as "two brains" because of this. It appears that both of them have long departed the reality that we live in.