Cognitive dissonance on trade with the EU.

There appear to be nearly as many opinions about whether Britain should sign a trade deal with the EU as there are people in Britain.

Some of these make some kind of sense whether I personally agree with them or not.

Other combinations of views - from both the Leave side and the Remain side - represent such an extreme cognitive dissonance. 

Let's look first at rational and irrational views from the hardline Brexiteers.

There are people on the Brexit side who argue that the EU has offered the UK preposterous terms. Clearly, this is very different from what most of these people were predicting before the referendum, when they were telling us that a trade deal between Britain and the countries remaining in the EU would be the easiest trade deal ever, but writing as someone who was always pessimistic about whether it would be easy to get a fantastic trade deal from the EU, I must say that the EU negotiators have taken an even harder and less reasonable line on some issues than I thought they would. 

I always thought that the Brexiteers were living in cloud cuckoo land expecting the EU to offer Canada +++ but the reasons given by the EU for not offering a deal equivalent to the one given to Canada were ridiculous.

Whether you actually think this or not, whoever is running the negotiations on the British side has to formally take the position that Britain should walk away rather than sign a really bad deal. Nobody should ever get themselves into the position of being in a negotiation where you can't walk away, because then you have no leverage at all.

The Brexiteer position which makes no sense at all, however., is that that "Leave" vote was a mandate for no deal. There was nothing on the ballot paper which said that "Leave" means "no trade deal."  And the leave campaign didn't say before the vote that a vote to leave meant a no deal Brexit - on the contrary, they promised that it would be easy to do a trade deal.

But it is not only on the Leave side that some people are displaying a complete absence of logic.

Let's consider the three propositions currently put forward by different hardline Remain camps.

Some people on the Remain side argue that "No deal" is the worst possible outcome for Britain. You can make a case for that, and I would have a great deal of sympathy for it.

Other people on the Remain side argue that you have to see whether a deal is any good before deciding whether to vote for it. There is a case for that view, and it applies as much to Remainders as to Leavers that it is not in Britain's interests for the other party to the negotiation to think that Britain will sign up to any deal no matter how bad it is.

A third group of Remainers argue that their side should vote against any deal because they refuse to be participants in Brexit. I am sorry to see some people who I would have expected to have more sense. such as Matthew Paris in today's Times, going along with this insanity.

Brexit has already happened. If the government comes back with a deal, parliament will not be presented with a choice between the deal they get and some fantasy perfect deal, nor between this deal and not leaving the EU after all. There will be two alternatives - one will be the specific real deal which is actually on the table, and the other will be a no deal Brexit.

Either "no deal" is the worst outcome, in which case one should vote for the deal, or the deal on offer is worse than a "no deal" Brexit, in which case one should vote against it.

To simultaneously argue that a "no deal" outcome is that the worst possible outcome, and that one should consider voting against a deal, is cognitive dissonance - e.g. it is supporting incompatible positions. Yet the shadow cabinet representative on "Any Questions" last night and today managed to embrace both those positions and she is far from being the only one.

Parliament needs to think through the choices Britain actually faces.