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Showers over Windermere from Holbeck Lane near Troutbeck.

2017 Predictions #1

January 6, 2017
Brexit

If you thought last year was crazy, put on your seat belts for 2017. Here are three predictions for the year ahead… and a few sporting hopes.

2016 was about the 3 P’s – Protectionism, Prejudice and Patriotism. It was also the Year of the 4th P… The Populist… and a 5th… Putin. Enough with the P words!

2017 will be a year of fairness, reason and generosity. A year where moderates and optimists regroup. (This is frankly more a wish than a prediction but we live in Hope).

4 predictions: #1 – Britain Won’t Brexit

Not for a while, at least. A CNN poll in mid-December affirmed the original Brexit vote – more Britons want the UK to leave the EU than want to remain. That a simple YES/NO question can result in the cacophony of chaos that is going to ensue in the Cabinet, Parliament, and Whitehall in 2017 and for years hence, is unbelievable. Reducing the future of the UK, Europe and possibly the world to a binary choice seems to have been a ludicrous strategy on the part of David Cameron. More responsibility should have been put on voters to make a more complex decision than YES/NO allowed.

Extricating the UK from the EU is mind-bogglingly complex, and there is collateral damage coming from both uncertainty and seismic financial and logistical events. I look at the EU as a tired bloated institution and understand why people voted to leave, but as a radical optimist – and a globalist – my instinct is to fix things first. I have written before that the only option for Britons to progress during the political and bureaucratic quagmire, is to double-down on personal purpose, business purpose, and national purpose. “Winning the world from the edge” is my New Zealand mantra. And now my British one.
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