It looks like being another bad year for forecasters. Having norsed up the election result, they have recently done the same over Brexit. Our economists and pollsters are like a village football team post-match, sitting in the changing room, heads down looking at their laces, unable to fathom how they could have been royally stuffed by a bunch of no-hopers comprising 10 schoolboys and a one-armed goalkeeper.
And it isn’t as if this is an isolated incident. For example that handful of the nation living in the Lake District, Scotland or atop a hill elsewhere should still be with us, but the rest? You see at the time of the Kyoto agreement in 1992, climate change forecasters told us with absolute conviction that if we did not effect a reduction of 20% in greenhouse emissions by 2015, mean sea levels would rise by at least half a meter, with the result that places like Oxford and Doncaster and, well you name it, would by now be seaside resorts.
Well, we haven’t got anywhere near that target and mean sea levels have actually risen just half a centimetre. Of course some of you would not have had to worry about where to park the boat, that’s because, not to put too fine a point on it, you would already have departed this mortal coil, struck down as one of the half a million or so deaths that we were assured would result from Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, arising from consuming meat products infected with BSE. Experts were emphatic that this would be the outcome; an emphasis that now looks a tad pessimistic when measured against the actual 177 deaths that followed. Oh and you vegetarians can cut the smirking because whilst you might well have dodged the BSE bullet, how good would you have been at dodging the aircraft falling from the skies and trains skittering from the tracks and a host of other electro-Armageddon’s occasioned by Y2K?
Y2K? Forgotten it, have you? That was the computer bug which, as the clock ticked over from 31 December 1999 to usher in the new millennium, was going to cause communications and systems havoc, because experts were positive computers would not recognise the year 2000.
It is against this background that the shooting magazines have been crammed with articles of late, each attempting to predict the likely impact of Brexit. That’s fair enough except where they stray from conjecture into certainty. The danger in that is that the certainty is universally dark with foreboding, telling us more about the authors’ feelings on the matter than it does about the likely outcome. If the shooting community is to get the best from the post-Brexit world, then it will do so much as it has done before the events of 23 June and that is by adopting a positive attitude, ignoring the commentators and forecasters, and following their instincts. Of that much we can all be certain