Reddit mentions of Termites in the Trading System: How Preferential Agreements Undermine Free Trade (Council of Foreign Relations)

I don't think your opinion is worthless at all. On the contrary. Britain needs enlightened Remain-voters to repair the damage done by the way the Remain campaign was mishandled in 2016.

You're right, we can't afford to have some irreparable breach with Europe - our friends and allies - and evolution is always preferable to revolution. I went into the 2016 campaign fully expecting to vote Remain. But being told, effectively, that Britain's economy was doing brilliantly, and that we should not mess it up with Brexit, was jaw-dropping, as discussed above. It made me suspicious of the credentials of those making that case.

And some of this comes down to "picking winners".

You ask what Britain should specialise in. I think that's been part of the problem. Two generations of the British elite have decided we should a) specialise in financial services and b) deliberately skew our trade towards Europe.

Neither makes much sense, either from a free-market viewpoint, or from a left-wing one. The idea that it's a good idea for a country to specialise its economy is very close to madness - it's an outright misunderstanding of the theory of competitive advantage. The economist and ex-Venezuelan finance minister Ricardo Hausmann explains why this is the case in pained-sounding clarity [here] (https://www.economics.utoronto.ca/gindart/2013-12-30%20-%20The%20specialization%20myth.pdf).

Secondly, choosing to skew our trade towards one part of the world is also a bit deranged. Ten years ago Jagdish Bhagwati, who as you probably know is a free-trade militant and famous for it, wrote [an entire book] (https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B001OD41SO/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1) on why such regional deals undermine free trade.

After all, their sheer proximity gives European companies an advantage in the British marketplace. Why should we reward them with further tariff and regulatory breaks? Why are we slapping a 20% tariff on imports of Australian orange juice - potentially a vital source of vitamins for poor Brits? Shouldn't we just be trying to buy food from whoever produces it most cheaply?

In exchange for market access for the City of London, we agreed to buy Europe's overpriced food and drink. By way of analogy, it's a bit like a bank manager winning the account for his local Waitrose by promising that his family will do all their grocery shopping in Waitrose, forever. I'm not convinced that deal makes the bank manager's family wealthier.

As for immigration, I would cite the government's UK Govt Migration Advisory Committee report, [September 2018] (https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/741926/Final_EEA_report.PDF)

> The small overall impacts mean that EEA migration as a whole has had neither the large negative effects claimed by some nor the clear benefits claimed by others.

Whereas the Remain campaign gave the strong impression that mass EU immigration had made Britain's existing population much wealthier.

I have many friends and indeed relatives who are EU migrants, and I'm very grateful they came here. But I don't blame voters who get angry at being told that immigration has assisted the prosperity of indigenous Britons. The facts don't support this claim.

Hence the Leave focus on immigration. I agree that the referendum was fought on emotive buzzwords. Most people can't articulate the kind of nuance that we're discussing here, but they understand many of these points at an instinctive level. Thus, the winning side was the one that was most adept at selecting buzzwords that tapped into this unease.

Leave did that very well, mainly by studying the rhetoric used in the 2014 referendum in Scotland, and honing it. Stupidly, Osborne and Cameron believed the 2014 referendum to have been a "victory" for their side (despite it having converted many unionist Scots into confirmed nationalists) and so decided to repeat the same tactics.

Remain was extremely unfortunate in its leadership, in this regard.

Where do we go from here? I don't want "frictionless" trade with the EU. It would simply preserve the harmful status quo, with more and more resources pouring into London. We cannot spatially or sectorally rebalance our economy within this organisation. The EU knows this is a problem, by the way, and has commissioned a huge amount of [research] (https://www.espon.eu/programme/projects/espon-2006/thematic-projects/enlargement-eu-and-its-polycentric-spatial-structure) into how it can defy economic gravity to create a "polycentric" Europe that promotes development in the geographic fringe, rather than in the Central European core. But it's impossible; the entire economic logic of the Single Market is the creation of EU super-clusters, not the preservation of existing national-level ones.

Nor do I want any permanent FTAs with other countries; all such deals should include a 5-year sunset clause so they can be cancelled by the next government. Democracy requires this, as much as anything else.

I have a horrible feeling, however, that some "deal" will be done with the EU to preserve our current pattern of trade, in perpetuity, with no means of evolving out of it. I hope I'm wrong, but I suspect I'm not.