Personally, I am wary of making the case for Brexit based on the Brexit wins that have already been made, such as niche trade statistics.
The reason is that, for most British people, life has got considerably worse since 2016. They are poorer, sicker, more anxious and less safe than a decade ago. That is not to say Brexit is to blame. However, the risk is by pointing to all these wonderful wins, one may come across like a detached member of the metropolitan elite who is winning while everyone else is losing.
The truth about Brexit is the best is yet to come.
When asked to justify Brexit, I like to begin with Albus Dumbledor's advice:
"It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are."
The whole point of Brexit was to allow us to make our own choices – to show what we truly are. More than the Brexit result itself, what should have mattered and what should have been the focus, were the thousands of smaller choices we made after the vote.
This is the case with all big decisions. For example, when someone decides to get a divorce, change career, go to university or move abroad, it is not the big decision itself that matters most, but the myriad micro-decisions we make afterwards. This is the philosophy behind the 'Aggregation of marginal Gains', most famously and successfully espoused by Team GB cycling chief Dave Brailsford. By making good choices every day, success compounds. Equally, small bad choices quickly lead to a downward spiral.
Once you understand that, it doesn't matter what you voted for in 2016. The Brexit opportunity suddenly makes sense. It is not the big decision that matters, but the thousands of choices we can make going forward. And that is where we have gone wrong. The bad choices made after Brexit have compounded.
The opportunity now is to turn Brexit dividend into millions of really good choices. In that sense we are at an auspicious point in history. Because Brexit has neatly preceded the digital revolution.
If we can combine Big Data with our new found sovereignty, Britain could be on the cusp of the most miraculous period of progress in human history.
This hyper-progress is already happening in the private sector. I call it Cronut Capitalism. To illustrate: In 2013, a notoriously innovative New York baker called Dominique Ansel invented the Cronut – a cross between a donut and a croissant. His luxury creation was an instant hit, particularly thanks to social media. Queues formed outside his bakery to snap up one of his rare treats. Yet within 18 months, every major British supermarket had a version of the cronut on its shelves for less than a pound.
This is how industries drive progress. In hyper-innovative industries, you have industry leaders, constantly innovating at the cutting edge. Then, chasing behind them, you have the 'fast followers.' Fast followers learn quickly from the innovators and copy them, delivering those improvements cheaply to the masses.
The clearest example of this structure is IT hardware (Jacob, as an Asian investor in the 90s and noughties, will get this right away). On the Apollo 11 mission to the moon, the computer hardware weighed more than the astronauts, cost billions of dollars, and was only accessible to the top brass of the world's most powerful military. Today, anyone can walk into a phone shop with a hundred quid and leave with more computing power than the entire Apollo 11 mission in their back pocket. And literally, every month, the tech gets faster and cheaper.
Thanks to AI and big data, every industry in the world is taking on this structure. Take the extractive industries (i.e. mining and fossil fuels). Even allowing for the Ukraine bump, from 2013 to 2022, almost every mined commodity along with oil and gas, fell 30-70% in real terms. To make matters worse, global rules around corruption, employment, disclosure and environmental standards tightened. And yet, in spite of that, the sector was making more money by 2022 than it was a decade ago! That is one heck of an achievement – imagine if the government cut spending by 40% tomorrow and the services got better!
The reason the extractive industries were able to do this was AI and big data. Managers used digital technology to collect millions of data points on everything (wages, equipment, shifts, injuries, etc, etc), across every mine, every oil well, and even across every worker. Then they used AI to analyse the data, to work out exactly what was working best, what wasn't and why. Like Dave Brailsford, that mass of information enabled the entire industry to aggregate marginal gains.
This is precisely the culture we need in government. All the answers are there, we just need to continuously look outward – collecting billions of data points on everything and from every local authority, region and country: Railways, prisons, taxes, cancer survival, energy prices, bin collections and so on. Then benchmark them all, and use AI (which is basically multifactor regression analysis) to analyse the differing performance and why.
In every area where we are not the world leader, we need to be a fast-follower. Worried about water scarcity? Look to Chile. Want a visa system that attracts productive workers and grows prosperity for citizens? Check out the UAE. Want to reform our 21,000-page tax shambles? Cookie-cutter Hong Kong. Worried about how to grow rich even as society ages? Try Singapore. Effective local devolution? Copy the Swiss constitution.
This is very much a Brexit story; because as well as the need for sovereignty, the best performing countries tend to be outside the EU and ECHR. For example, none of the world's fastest growing economies are in Europe.
To top it off, Trumpism is echoing exactly the same sentiment. Global collectivist welfarism is over. Successful nations like the US are no longer willing or able to bail out the rest of the world, via aid, military support or one-sided trade deals.
This gives us a glimpse of a new international order that Brexit Britain (in partnership with Trump's MAGA and leading tech businesses) could pioneer.
In future, international organisations should not dictate to countries or abuse their powers to override democratic will. Instead, they must evolve into data-sharing hubs: using AI to scrub information from across the world, benchmark countries and regions, and uncover the optimal solutions to humanity's problems.
If we get this right, then, when any country or region falls behind (e.g. on educational standards, diabetes, tax competitiveness, road safety or anything else), they will be able to go to, say, the WHO, EU, NATO or the WTO, and literally pick the optimised solution off the shelf. Moreover, AI will tailor that solution to that specific country or region (taking account of factors like per capita GDP, demographics, climate, culture etc).
In this new world, the concept of foreign aid is dead. There is zero excuse for any country to fail at anything. On everything, you either become a fast follower (imitator) or a leader (innovator). Given the pace of gains seen in the private sector, there is no excuse for any country not to be as wealthy as Singapore in 40 years' time. For developed economies, like the UK, there is no excuse for not growing per capita GDP at 5%+ and giving our kids the same quality of life as a billionaire enjoys today.
Now, there is a brave case for Brexit I can really get behind!