After the long discussion in part 1, this is somewhat shorter…

If it is accepted that public debate on the specifics of matters like Brexit is inevitably limited to unprovable matters of belief, one is left with the question of how should it be debated.

Rather than resorting to claim and counter-claim, it would have been much better to establish a set of key principles against which to evaluate competing options. While this partially happened at political level, the difficulty is transferring it to the public arena, and an audience that inevitably has neither the knowledge to evaluate what is being suggested nor (probably) much patience with arcane technicalities.

The proof of this was the failure of Remain to capture public support. And their opposition did not help either its own case or the debate as a whole by being repeatedly unable to convey either a focused, specific definition of what Leave actually meant, or even a set of specific criteria against which its claims could be evaluated.

Add to that a public whose understanding of the issue largely resides in the category ‘unknown unknowns’ (i.e. it doesn’t even know what it needs to know in order to make an informed decision) – and constitutional arrangements that are arcane in the extreme – and we had the recipe for a perfect storm.

Experience suggests that much of the public remains in a state of not wanting to hear what it needs to know either. This is what my book was hoping to address: a relatively non-partisan examination of the physical and psychological state of the nation which is arguably the real problem underpinning the whole issue.

Trying to persuade people whose very position is founded on a rejection of outsiders that they would do well to heed the observations of disinterested third-parties is a good definition of being onto a loser. And so it has proved – no matter that most commentators in ‘friendly’ countries have advised that Brexit is a disastrous move even when seen from a distance, the message fell on deaf ears. So much for trying to advocate the benefits of critical thinking: it seems that you need to be able to think reasonably critically about that too, before you become remotely ‘open’ enough to have a proper debate.

I will end with two things:

Firstly, here is a link to a website that despite its name is an independent media organisation. Its views on the impact of the U.K.’s current position within the E.U. might have been worth considering.

Secondly, given that the debate was not symmetrical – in other words, Brexit was the antagonist as it proposed to change the status quo, and therefore the burden of proof was on it to convince its doubters that such a change was right. This it never did, preferring to rely instead on what it is all too easy to describe as sensationalism and misinformation.

Here are some of the techniques it used to do that:

• Hasty generalisation: because there are things wrong with the EU the whole thing is corrupt
• Sweeping generalisation: because some immigrants have gamed our systems, that is what they are all doing
• Confusing cause and effect: things are bad in Britain because we are in the EU.
• Oversimplification of cause and effect: If we leave the EU everything will be alright.
• Confusing correlation and cause: because there are things wrong in Britain and things wrong with the EU, the one must be the cause of the other.
• Slippery slope: If we stay in an imperfect EU it will be the end of our country as we know it.
• Ad hominem: attacking their opponents personally rather than the arguments they were making.
• Straw person: misrepresenting Remainers as ardent EU apparatchiks in order to disredit them.
• Arguing from one thing to another: Because we don’t like the EU, the EU is therefore abhorrent.
• False dichotomy: if the EU is not perfect, then it must be terrible.

This is pretty much the full house of logical flaws – and the Brexit debate seems to have fallen foul of virtually all of them.

The final step of critical analysis is to look for plausible alternatives to evaluate against the main claim. The main one, which seems to be that the EU is a neo-liberal threat/a bullying dictatorship/in the pay of big business/responsible for the decline of Britain/undemocratic, requires answers to certain questions about the current nature and behaviour of that organisation. Here are ten which in my view needed answers:

1. If the EU is ‘anti-citizen’, what is the purpose and effect of social programmes, such as the Social Chapter, the Working Time Directive, the Charter of Fundamental Rights etc.?

2. If it is in the pocket of big business, what is the purpose and effect of programmes such as the WEEE directive, the CE safety mark etc, all of which add costs to all (but especially big) businesses? Why did it, for example, also impose limits on mobile phone roaming charges?
3. If the EU is a centralising body, what is the purpose and effect of Subsidiarity, and why does it pump significant funds into regional aid?
4. If the EU is undemocratic, why does it require unanimity between member states for all of its major decisions (such as approving Brexit)?
5. If the EU is undemocratic, what is the purpose and effect of direct elections to one of its three main institutions, and indirect elections to the second (via national elections)?
6. Why is the unelected status of the Commission (in effect the civil service) so objectionable when the civil service in Whitehall is not elected either?
7. Why is it unreasonable for Britain to pay to belong to the EU when it has one of its largest domestic economies, and it agreed the formula for contribution calculations? (The other two populous large economies (France and Germany) pay more).
8. Why are the investments made in Britain by the EU, such as regional investment, not considered in your figures when costing the amount Britain pays to the EU?
9. Given that Westminster one the one hand has approved around 95% of EU legislation and on the other has been fined for its failure to meet standards and timescales on vehicle emissions, beach cleanliness and waste electrical goods recycling (to name but three) what evidence is there that Westminster would give equal priority to addressing these issues if not held to account by the EU?
10. What reasons were there for Britain seeking and obtaining exemptions from significant parts of EU legislation, such as the Social Chapter (for many years), the Working Time Directive, the Single Currency, the adoption of Schengen and more? Has the country benefited or the opposite from being outside these schemes? (As an example, is it mere coincidence that the country exempted from WTD is now the country with the longest working hours? What effect has this had?) The website linked earlier passes reasonably impartial judgement on some of these matters.

If Brexiters had been able to answer these questions to the standards of rigour demanded by Critical Thinking (and had the population been able to ask them in the first place) then the case for Brexit might have been a lot stronger. As it is, we are largely still waiting.