What we know and what we don’t know in the Brexit fog

World of Politics with Harry McGee – harrymcgee@gmail.com

Two phrases from history played on my mind this week – and both have a stronger relevance than ever in the face of our current political crisis. It was an American World War II veteran Robert McNamara – later head of Ford and then Defense Secretary to JKF and LBJ – who first coined the phrase ‘fog of war’.

His premise was that when war started, what occurred was so complicated to analyse and plan for that it was beyond the scope of human comprehension. It was impossible to foresee – hence the ‘fog of war’.

Writing about the Great Depression, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith said that just before the 1929 crash he was at a dinner party where a doctor told him to get in quick and buy tracts of land in a swampy area of Florida.

What struck Galbraith was that not only was the doctor completely ignorant about economics, he also did not know he was ignorant about economics.

“They did not know that they did not know,” was the great phrase that came out of the book.

And, sadly, both phrases seem to apply at the moment.

Nobody really knows what’s going to happen after Brexit, and the impact it’s going to have.

If a border goes up, we are going to experience pain. The extent of that pain, we just can’t say. Is it being overinflated by some like the Y2K scare of 20 years ago? Or will it as bad, or worse, as is being predicted by some Cassandras? So that’s the fog of war bit.

The other is the ignorance surrounding it. You find out quickly in a crisis that people you though were smart and clever and knew what they were doing were operating on the basis of a wing and a prayer.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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