I have always had a bit of a smile at the way Brexiteers are happy to trade on WTO rules. Rules, you note. Set by one of those unelected bodies. Here is a clipping from therir 'who are we?' page:

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At its heart are the WTO agreements, negotiated and signed by the bulk of the world’s trading nations. These documents provide the legal ground rules for international commerce. They are essentially contracts, binding governments to keep their trade policies within agreed limits.
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Binding governments? - sounds like a loss of sovereignty to me. Contracts? - ruled over by a non-UK court? Surely that's exactly what the leavers are complaining about?

True, the UK signed up - just as it did to the EU rules....

Then there's Trump, who is not happy to abide by the WTO rules. He may or not break them, but there is no guarantee that the WTO rules are a firm foundation at all.

"Wild west territory" seems a good short hand to me for the state we would be in. I agree with Leavers to this extent - eventually the effects of leaving will settle down into some other stable configuration, just as the wild west did. Whether that is better or worse than now is debatable, but eventually a settlement will occur.

There will be some winners. Like the fall of the USSR, (or the Reformation, which someone compared Brexit to on the radio yesterday), it will mainly be those which enough resources and the right contacts now who will find themselves better off in 50 (or 500!) years. But there will also be some small fry who do quite well. I was buying some cheese last weekend and got chatting. This guy makes a small quantity of brie, gouda and similar style cheeses which he sells as premium products to the middle classes. Now, IF he isn't too affected by changes of subsidies and can get more land, and goats, and manage the expansion, and the middle class purchasers are themselves not too badly affected, a tariff or other barrier that makes foreign cheese more expensive can only help him. However, it is a total change of business to move from selling to a few hundred relatively wealthy customers to becoming a nationwide supplier of supermarkets - if it happens at all, it will take many years. It is not his aim either, doubling the number of cheeses he makes would be a reasonable ambition from his point of view.


He needs to be compared to a small scale haulier I know who is in fear and dread that even a month or two chaos will destroy her company. Waiting for a new long term stability to appear will not help her.