Diversions Manifold

Every Christmas, Easter and family birthday, as I list out the contents of a parcel on what feels like an excessively conspicuous “non-EU deliveries” sticker, then pay the suddenly exorbitant postage and customs fees to the UK; every time that, right at the end of the ordering process, a British website discovers that I’m based in Europe, or a European online store learns to its horror that I want to ship to the UK - indeed, every time I want to ship nice things, only to discover that they won’t, and now that the formerly anticipatory, family-related traipse to the post office has become a trudge to bureaucracy, I silently curse Brexit. These are, in the grand scheme of things, little niggles, already well known to anyone who has ever wanted to ship to countries like the USA or Japan. But they always remind me that the UK - barely but clearly (though for some vague notion of “Brexit means Brexit”) - voted and then acted to make things worse than they had been until just very recently.

For a while during the initial phases of the first lockdown, there was some discussion about the prevention paradox , the risk that beneficial actions taken on a population basis will leave many individuals thinking: what’s the big deal, or, why should I pay that price?  A good summary of the prevention paradox is contained within this pre-Covid quote from the International Journal of Epidemiology (emphasis mine): ‘[the population strategy] offers only a small benefit to each individual, since most of them were going to be all right anyway, at least for many years. This leads to the prevention paradox: “A preventive measure which brings much benefit to the population [yet] offers little to each participating individual” … and thus there is poor motivation for the subject. … In mass prevention each individual has usually only a small expectation of benefit, and this small benefit can easily be outweighed by a small risk’ The first Covid lockdowns in Europe helped to slow the spread of

From  View from the EU: Britain 'taken over by gamblers, liars, clowns and their cheerleaders' , a view from Helene von Bismarck: “Populists depend on enemies, real or imagined, to legitimise their actions and deflect from their own shortcomings,” she said. If the EU has been the “enemy abroad” since 2016, it will steadily be replaced by “enemies within”: MPs, civil servants, judges, lawyers, experts, the BBC. Oversimplification, lack of nuance are greedily seen as ways of cutting the Gordian knot of complex debate and "getting things done". There are times and places for such methods, but not permanently in running a country.  Also, from John Crace in the same paper ( On Boris's big day, Tories kid themselves this is the deal they always wanted ) "He had united his party – if only temporarily – over Europe. So it was job done for Boris, as Brexit had mainly only been about divisions within his own party. "

Labour had a seemingly impossible decision to make regarding the Brexit trade deal vote in the House of Commons on Wednesday 30th December. Labour leader Keir Starmer is quoted as saying: “The choice before the house today is perfectly simple. Do we implement the treaty that has been agreed with the EU, or do we not? If we choose not to, the outcome is clear: we leave the transition period without a deal. Without a deal on security, on trade, on fisheries. Without protection for our manufacturing sector, for farming, for countless businesses. And without a foothold to build a future relationship with the EU.” To me, the words "perfectly simple" are rather disingenuous. Starmer tried to portray the judgement as a binary choice, whereby all other considerations are neglected. That can be seen as clear leadership; it can also be a sign of a leader uncomfortable with conflict.  Fortunately, there was some public debate on the day: [Stella] Creasy said in a statement on her websi

The Brexit pre-mortem: BFMEA Of all the engineering tools that I have encountered, the one that spans the widest spectrum of respect and scorn, hope and despair is the FMEA , the Failure Mode and Effects Analysis. Developed by the US military and NASA and gradually adopted by the automotive industry from the 1970s onwards, it is intended to highlight things that could go wrong before they do; it's also a way of collecting and tracking the evidence (models, test reports, etc) that shows that the nuts and bolts have been proven before putting them on a rocket - or, indeed, jettisoning a country out of the European Union. At its heart, the FMEA is a "what if?" analysis. Other methods are available, like the Potential Problem Analysis from Kepner-Tregoe. But I'm automotive, and the FMEA is a requirement in our field, so I've sketched up how a BFMEA (Brexit Failure Mode and Effects Analysis) might have been constructed and eventually look like. W

ABQP: Advanced Brexit Quality Planning It is surely doing the British Civil Service an injustice to suggest that there was no planning process for Brexit. However, what we see in the media strongly suggests that whatever planning did take place was swiftly overcome by politics: the votes upon votes in Parliament, the pontificating and hardening of views, the dreams shattered and still dearly held. We hear of Papers stating one potential outcome or another, but the feeling remains of a Brexit ship veering ponderously from port to port, turning away from each in disgust without ever reaching one. I'm an automotive engineer, and could imagine Brexit being an automotive project; there would (in my imaginings, anyway) have been a clear baseline for planning, thinking, moulding, approving or even cancelling the project before it's too late. Comparing Brexit with a VW Polo facelift? Ridiculous! Well, yes, but I feel there are some lessons in the processes that w