“We’ve Taken Back Control!” — And Misplaced the Instructions

by RIchArd Pooley

Photo: Annie Spratt, Unsplash

I was standing in line at the bakery here in the Dordogne last week—yes, another tale from the land of crisp baguettes and existential shrugging—when an English couple ahead of me asked, in oddly precise tones, for "deux croissants et un pain au chocolat, s’il vous plaît". The woman turned to her partner with a triumphant smile, clearly proud of her linguistic victory. Then, after paying, she muttered just loud enough for the rest of us expats to hear: “Still not sure it was worth all the red tape just for this.” She was, of course, talking about Brexit.

Now, I try not to be smug. Truly. But as I sipped my coffee (made by a machine older than some trade agreements), I found myself reflecting—as one does in rural France—on the curious case of the British economy and its recent penchant for self-inflicted wounds.

A Self-Imposed Slow Puncture

Brexit, we were told, would unshackle the United Kingdom from the bureaucratic behemoth of Brussels. The image was of a nimble Albion, bursting with pent-up entrepreneurial vigour, striking deals faster than you can say "chlorinated chicken."

And yet.

The Office for Budget Responsibility—our modern-day Delphic oracle—quietly estimated that the long-term hit to the UK economy from Brexit will be worse than that from the pandemic. A 4% reduction in GDP, to be precise. Not so much a quick jab to the ribs as a slow puncture of the economy’s tyres.

Trade? Down. Business investment? Down. Labour force? Shrinking. That global Britain swagger turned out to be more of a limp.

The Curious Case of the Disappearing Fruit Pickers

I have a friend who runs a soft fruit farm in Herefordshire. “Used to be full of Poles and Romanians in summer,” he told me last July, over a pint of something warm and flat. “Now I’ve got teenagers who quit after a day and pensioners who can’t tell a raspberry from a rogue thistle.”

Freedom of movement, it turns out, worked both ways.

Whole industries built on flexible European labour—farming, hospitality, healthcare—have found themselves scrambling to fill gaps. The great “British jobs for British workers” plan may sound good in a speech, but in the field, behind the bar, or at the care home, the vacancies linger.

Customs, Delays, and Other Love Letters from Dover

Exports have become a labyrinth of paperwork. Small businesses, once happily shipping cheese to Copenhagen or gin to Ghent, now face a sea of forms, fees, and the occasional spoiled shipment. Some gave up. Others went under. The bureaucratic leviathan wasn't slain; it just changed postcode.

And for what? A blue passport and some commemorative 50p coins?

The Invisible Damage

Unlike a financial crash or a war, the economic effects of Brexit are subtle, cumulative. It's not that Britain fell off a cliff; it's that it’s walking into a headwind, pretending the breeze is invigorating. The damage is in the choices not made, the investments not secured, the opportunities quietly moving elsewhere.

A German friend in Toulouse asked me recently, “Why did the British vote to become smaller?” I didn’t have a ready answer. I still don’t.

Ah, but Sovereignty!

Yes, we got our laws back. (Not that most people could name the ones we lost.) We got our fish back. (Though they now have trouble reaching EU markets.) We got to make our own trade deals. (Which, curiously, look a lot like the ones we had before.)

Perhaps, in the end, the great Brexit experiment has delivered what it promised: control. But like a toddler given the car keys, we’ve discovered that control doesn’t guarantee direction—or competence.

So, What Now?

There’s a quiet realism settling in among the public. The fever pitch of 2016 has given way to a dull ache, like a hangover from a party that went on far too long and wasn’t very good in the first place.

And yet, in true British fashion, we carry on. Grumbling, muddling through, pretending that the kettle still works even if it now costs 25% more to boil.

Back in the bakery queue, the English woman sighed and said, “Still, at least the croissants are worth the hassle.”

They are. But I couldn’t help wondering: what else did we lose in pursuit of a principle that no longer feeds us?

Photo: Andrea de Santis, Unsplash

Puzzled? If you are a regular reader or a friend (sometimes the same person), you may well be. You know that I don’t live in the Dordogne. My now second home is in the Lot Department; granted it’s in the upper Dordogne valley. Nor do you get the point in the first paragraph: why would Brexit have changed the way the Brit orders her croissants? Moreover the really attentive reader will have remembered from a previous article that in the village’s southern boulangerie you order une chocolatine, not un pain au chocolat.

I didn’t write this article. Artificial Intelligence did. Hence the capital A and I in my name. My daughter, Head of Digital at a Florida advertising and marketing agency, typed in the following instruction into her employer-paid-for version of Chat GPT: “Write an article on the damage done to the UK economy by Brexit in no more than 1000 words. Do it in the style of Richard Pooley’s articles in Only Connect." It took 5 seconds to produce the above post.

I have no friend who runs a soft fruit farm in Herefordshire, nor a German one in Toulouse. So, AI makes up stuff. In this case it has to. Otherwise the article is not going to fool you into believing I am the author. I tell stories and quote people I have met or know. ChatGPT only had 59 articles to work with and those probably tell it ((he? she? sh/it?) that I know farmers, I live not far from Herefordshire in the UK, I have German friends and my French house is only 2 hours north of Toulouse.

Even so, I was impressed. Who could not be? It got my writing style. Apart from the nonsensical croissant stuff, there is a logical, if fact-light, flow to the piece. Even so, I doubt I would use AI in quite the same way in future. What I was after were facts and arguments, to help me create an essay which drew on personal experience and anecdotes. If I were to choose the same subject, I would just type in "Write an article of no more than 1000 words on the damage to the British economy of Brexit."

What I had not expected was to get an analysis of my writing style. At first, I was delighted. It was so insightful. And so well-written. And so flattering. It covered every aspect, giving examples from my most recent article - "Overall Tone and Voice, Structure and Flow, Language and Style Techniques, Perspective and Themes". The "In Short" at the end had me glowing:

"Richard Pooley’s style is anecdotal yet analytical, humorous but incisive, deeply personal yet culturally observant. It's the writing of someone who has seen enough of the world to recognize absurdity — and patience — on all sides."

Hold on though. Where was the negative criticism? I use brackets too often. My sentences can be over-long. Do I over-use the semi-colon... and the hyphen? Dear long-time reader, add a few more failings in the Comments section below. If ChatGPT had got this analytical method from some eminent Professor of English Literature, what does that tell us about the standards of literary criticism in our universities? This would have been too much even for a publisher's marketing manager to put on the back cover of a new novel.

My worry with AI has always been that it will stop people having to think for themselves. True, schoolchildren and university students are nearly all using an AI tool to help them write their homework and essays. To help but not to do the whole job. If the latter were the case, teachers and tutors would surely find themselves getting very similar work handed in to them. Unless, of course, each student added to their instruction "...in the style of Steven Pinker/J G Ballard/Stephen Fry"

There was a disturbing coda to this little exercise. I could not find the original article produced by my daughter's advanced ChatGPT. So I typed the same instruction into the free version. Up came a very short but witty essay. And with it an analysis of the writing style of Robert Shrimsley, the Financial Times' chief political commentator. I had just read his column in the FT Weekend, something I do every Saturday. But I was not aware I had said anything about it or mentioned his name, although I had thought his article an amusing read. I checked my instructions. No mistake. I had written "in the style of Richard Pooley, based on his articles in Only Connect." Robert Shrimsley/Richard Pooley. Okay, there is a certain similarity, but, hey, can Chat GPT read my mind?