Documents

As the Brexit negotiations begin to focus on future trading and customs arrangements these
notes reprise the principal theme of Brexit and the Single Market2 (published in July 2016 in
the wake of the referendum) and add comments on some aspects of the subsequent discourse.
Very briefly, my conclusion back then was that the most efficacious way to respond to the
Leave vote on 23 June 2016 would be to seek a Brexit based on the UK’s continued
membership of the European Economic Area (EEA) in the period immediately following
withdrawal from the Treaty of Lisbon. There were three main reasons for taking this view.

This essay is a developed version of the Zeeman Lecture given at the Regulatory Policy Institute’s Annual Conference on 26 September 2017 at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford University. The motivation for the Lecture was that, in the period since the Brexit Referendum on 23 June 2016, politicians, interest groups, journalists and commentators have fed the public a steady diet of alternative facts and false or misleading propositions. The Lecture focused on three of a much wider set of such assertions and propositions. All are relevant to the future conduct of regulatory policy, though each in different ways. Each is associated with a cognitive style that I have called convenient, selective myopia.