Brexit Metaphor No 118.
Theresa May's 10th defeat in Parliament over Brexit on February 14 shows there was no love lost between her and her MPs on Valentine's Day. Her Brexit plans keep coming back riddled with votes against her like British RAF fighter planes coming back from missions in World War Two riddled with bullet holes from German anti-aircraft fire. Her fundamental mistake is that she is trying to fix the bullet holes, which are not essential. Instead, she should be tackling the life-or-death matter.
One of the most fundamental moments in the science of statistics comes from one such episode in World War Two, when the RAF decided to armour up its planes to better protect them from enemy fire. The instinctive decision was to count the bullet holes in different parts of planes returning from mission and reinforce the areas that got hit most often. However, this was an obvious but wrong decision, as mathematician Abraham Wald higlighted at the time. If a plane came back safely, the number of bullet holes did not matter as holes in areas such as the wings indicated non-essential damage. What really mattered were the areas that did not contain bullet holes on surviving planes (the engines and the propellers), as the planes that got hit in exactly those areas would not have survived at all and would not have returned to base to be included in the study sample.
Theresa May should similarly ask herself what Brexit deals she has not managed to bring back to Parliament, rather than trying to armour up the damaged areas of the deal that she has brought back. A deal containing a second EU referendum (People's Vote) or a negotiated Customs Union would be the essential missing planes in her fleet returning from the Continent.
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| RAF Avro Lancaster plane from WW2 (Source: Wikipedia) |
Notes:
1. Timeline: This article is part of a series of original #BrexitMetaphors published daily. A total of 118 have been posted so far and another 43 Brexit Metaphors will be published every day until the planned Brexit date of March 29, 2019.
2. Disclosure: The author has a master's degree in European Integration. He also thinks he knows a bit about business, economics, entrepreneurship, China, history, geography, nature, science and Rubik Cubes.
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