The book you should be reading

Miles Saltiel is one of us, a Senior Fellow here at the ASI. He is also author of an interesting little new book available here. Given that Saltiel is one of us it is of course a perfectly formed volume and at a very free market price of only 99 p.

However, it's also rather more than that as it's a little bit of instant history. Saltiel was running a blog and discussion group of various connected and high level people in the run up to the Brexit referendum and beyond. This is a collection of pieces from those discussions. And the joy of such collections is that they are indeed that instant history.

All too often the historian is looking back, knowing how things turned out, and then fitting events into that knowledge structure. The advantage of something like this, a diary almost of the discussion, is that we can see opinions changing as they really did change, without that hindsight. How we all thought that leave got a head of steam up in that last couple of weeks to be derailed by the awful murder. The Remainiacs attempting to capitalise on it rather being ignored by the public - but even so, right on the eve of the vote most thinking that remain had won. And then the realisation that we really were going to be free and sovereign again.

Quite the most important part is the discussion after the vote. As it becomes clear that the EU will offer nothing without freedom of movement. And as that's the red line over on our side (while Saltiel and we think said freedom a jolly good idea that's not what either the people nor the government believe) then the rest of the decision is already taken for us.

As we are going to restrict immigration therefore we will be having hard, or as Eamonn Butler, also of this parish, puts it, clean, Brexit. For there isn't anything else to be had given the migration stance.

As a whole it's an interesting read as a record of how people realised and when what was going on. The important policy part is what is said after the vote has been won. And as a guide to what will happen that analysis seems spot on to us.