Brexit is a wart on the face of Britain and folk remedies can't help

By George ILIEV
Brexit Metaphor No 145 

Brexit is a wart on the face of the British political landscape and the economy. The worse part is that British politicians are dealing with it in an utterly chaotic way: Parliament voted against the Withdrawal Agreement on March 12 and against a No-Deal Brexit on March 13. The only thing they haven't tried yet are folk remedies. Tom Sawyer recommends using "spunk water" (water collected in the hollow of a tree stump) for treating warts, while Huckleberry Finn prefers throwing a dead cat into a graveyard. Would you be surprised if you saw on March 14 a headline in The Sun: 

"Tender for the procurement of 650 dead cats for Westminster."

The face of Brexit Britain

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Notes:
1. Timeline: This article is part of a series of original #BrexitMetaphors published daily. A total of 145 have been posted so far and another 16 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.
3. Invitation: If you'd like to contribute to the debate, please leave a comment below or re-tweet the blogpost link.
4. Sign-up: I would be thrilled if you signed up to receive my blog daily by entering your email address in the blank in the top right-hand corner of this page.
5. Thank you for being here!

If Brexit is delayed, it will start resembling a sausage

By George ILIEV
Brexit Metaphor No 139 

"Everything has an end. Only the sausage has two ends."

This German saying is about to become a Brexit joke as well if Brexit is delayed by the March 12-14 Parliament votes. If the original March 29 Brexit date is pushed back by two months to around the time of the European Parliament elections in May 2019, Brexit will start resembling a two-month-long sausage from one end to the other (never mind the beginning).

And if Brexit is delayed again beyond that (provided a constitutional solution can be found how Britain can send unelected delegates to the European Parliament in the interim), it may acquire a third end and start resembling a samosa.

Sausage or samosa, we won't be starving - especially those of us who have already made three weekend trips to the supermarket to stockpile food.

And if the sausage is rolled up one end into the other like the one on the photo, Brexit might be avoided altogether. No voodoo or shamanism necessary: just roll up any sausages you can get hold of and pray for the best. It might have a more predictable effect than what chaotic British politics can currently deliver.

Sausage with two ends (Source: Wikipedia)

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Notes:
1. Timeline: This article is part of a series of original #BrexitMetaphors published daily. A total of 139 have been posted so far and another 22 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.
3. Invitation: If you'd like to contribute to the debate, please leave a comment below or re-tweet the blogpost link.
4. Sign-up: I would be thrilled if you signed up to receive my blog daily by entering your email address in the blank in the top right-hand corner of this page.
5. Thank you for being here!

Brexit through the prism of Thinking Fast and Slow: oversimplified problem gets wrong treatment

By George ILIEV
Brexit Metaphor No 107. 

When faced with a predator, you have to think fast or else you won't survive. Humans have evolved to adopt simplified solutions to urgent problems. However, when faced with a complex but not urgent problem, you should take your time and deliberate, advises Daniel Kahneman, the psychologist and behavioural economist who won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2002. Kahneman describes these at two systems of thinking in his 2011 book "Thinking, Fast and Slow":
System 1: fast, instinctive and emotional;
System 2: slower, deliberative and logical.

In war, countries have to think and act fast. But in peacetime slow deliberation is advisable. When one manages an ecosystem (whether biological or socio-economic), one has to grasp and embrace complexity and understand that every action has multiple consequences.

Yet, this is not what happened in the 2016 EU referendum in Britain and in the Brexit process. An oversimplified solution was put to the vote of the British people (In or Out) and they voted Leave with great urgency. The resulting chaos continues to this day.

Einstein said that “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” Consultants often use a 2x2 matrix to simplify the world. The EU referendum did not even go to this level of complexity and only offered a one-dimensional vote. Thus when both the problem and the solution go down a mistaken thinking process, the problem is likely to be bogus and the solution is likely to be a chimera.

Thinking, Fast and Slow (Source: Wikipedia)

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Notes:
1. Timeline: This article is part of a series of original #BrexitMetaphors published daily. A total of 107 have been posted so far and another 54 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.
3. Invitation: If you'd like to contribute to the debate, please leave a comment below or re-tweet the blogpost link.
4. Sign-up: I would be thrilled if you signed up to receive my blog daily by entering your email address in the blank in the top right-hand corner of this page.
5. Thank you for being here!