In the absence of any coherent answer from the Brexiteers (why am I not surprised at that?), here's a couple of paras from Simon Schama's essay in the FT yesterday ("When Britain chose Europe," https://www.ft.com/content/68c8efa8-39df-11e9-b72b-2c7f526ca5d0 which doesn't seem to be behind the paywall):"The Great Recession [of 2008] and, more to the point, the grossly unequal distribution of the recovery, has put all this in jeopardy, not just in Britain but everywhere. Suddenly disparities between regions, sectors of the economy (manufacturing vs services) and social groups seemed brutally intolerable. Many of the problems are rooted in long-term structural shifts: automation; weak demand for non-Asian assembled manufactures. But raw fury needs someone rather than something to blame, and thus was born the mythical enemy: the unassimilable, crime-prone, slave-wage hungry immigrant, and their manipulative masters, the rootless, cosmopolitan “elite”, be they “faceless” Brussels bureaucrat or the international villain George Soros.And so the dreamers fall back into the arms, not of the true history of our country — with its endless successive waves of immigrants, Protestant, Jewish, Muslim, its tenuous union of four nations in one kingdom (minus, not so long ago, Scotland), reigned over by immigrant dynasties, Scots and German — but instead of an imaginary, sempiternal, unchanging ur-Albion, unnaturally indentured to alien continental masters and groaning to be returned to its own true sovereign self. It’s not surprising that there has been an abysmal failure on the part of Brexiters to offer a clear and credible sense of Britain’s eventual destination, because the ecstasy of departure was always more important than any sort of eventual arrival. As attempts to conclude trade deals with major trading partners such as Japan and China (rather than the Faroe Islands and Liechtenstein) freeze in failure, the “Global Britain” vision promised by Brexit is laid bare as the pathetic fantasy it always was."But the whole article is worth reading, not least for the historical perspective it casts on the absurd, self-harming Brexit farce.
Richard Carter ● 2810d