We’re ready to talk covertly about Brexit failure – but still far from ready to fix it

theguardian.com:

I n a life-enhancing essay that confirms, if nothing else, that he would have been the all-time ideal dinner party guest, Robert Louis Stevenson writes that to talk with others about the affairs of the day is to “bear our part in that great international congress, always sitting, where public wrongs are first declared, public errors first corrected, and the course of public opinion shaped, day by day, a little nearer to the right”.

The written word, to which Stevenson himself brought such a gifted hand, will always fall short of the richness of the talk that precedes it, he argues. Literature itself “is no other than the shadow of good talk” in which “the imitation falls far short of the original in life, freedom and effect”. Indeed, no legislative measure ever comes before parliament, Stevenson suggests, unless “it has been long ago prepared by the grand jury of the talkers”.

Modern Britain should honour the good sense of this grand jury of talkers more attentively than it does. Disturbingly, this is not a view to which everyone now subscribes. Brexiters such as Nigel Farage, David Frost or the Daily Mail certainly do not. For them, to even mention Brexit in any terms other than a dragooned and uncritical celebration of Britain’s departure from the EU is anathema and dangerous.

In their near-hysterical responses to news that a group of all-party politicians and assorted experts had met to discuss how Brexit could “work better with our neighbours in Europe” last week, the critics went straight to ramming speed. The meeting at Ditchley Park in Oxfordshire was variously condemned as a “full sell-out” (Farage), a “plot” (Frost) and “a smug assemblage of arrogant establishment figures who think they know best” (a Mail