Florence and the Machine

I always had doubts over Brexit. Never a doubt that we should leave; in that I have never wavered since 1975. I also still believe what my teenage self thought - that this was a betrayal of British history and a craven admission of weakness. And right from the start I felt vindicated in my views when, year after year, corruption and incompetence went unaddressed, even rewarded. Wine lakes, butter mountains and perverse funding allocations are, unfortunately, inevitable consequences of complexity.

Running a sole trader business can be tricky enough, especially in a competitive market; being responsible for employing others far more so. As you scale up an enterprise it becomes impossible to keep a realistic overview of the whole organisation and when you get to national level, roles become so speciated that it is impossible for them to interact in a meaningful way. (This is one reason why Communism can never work; you have to let natural economics have its way if you want to avoid both oversupply of un-needed goods and rationing of essentials.)

Thus sensible western governments evolved a useful model of governance without too much overt regulation and a laissez-faire approach to the economy as a whole, intervening only where sensible coordination and national interest were required. If this meant that the French thought differently from the Dutch, so be it; variety being the spice of life and all that.

But with the advent of the EU that all changed. When the common market we were persuaded to join morphed, almost without a murmur, into a supranational behemoth of complex control over every aspect of our lives we began the process which has taken us to where we are now. Anti-Brexiteers demand to know our destination – where will Brexit take us? Well here we are at the destination to which EU membership has brought us all. Like the view?

Across Europe we appear to be powerless to confront a migrant flood which will have a devastating and impoverishing effect on us all, because having submitted to the rule of an unimpeachable junta we seem unwilling or unable to protect ourselves. We are afraid to say anything for fear of causing offence to persons unknown. We accept edict after edict and do as we are told and defer to others when we should be determining for ourselves how we function as a society.

The rise of the EU and its inevitable collapse has us all in its thrall - and collapse it will, as have all other administrations before it. The world is always changing but so many fault lines seem to be converging at the moment as to make this implosion potentially catastrophic. That we were prepared to man the lifeboats before we struck the iceberg should have been a signal to others to look to their own survival.

But no; the Prime Minister who for party purposes granted a referendum he assumed he would win abandoned ship immediately after the result. The shuffling about for a replacement was only the start of delaying the execution of the people’s wish. His replacement was always, at best, a placeholder until a new, decisive leader could be found, but we agreed to give her a chance. I always had doubts over Brexit and yesterday those doubts were realised. Theresa May’s olive branch offering in Florence was a simple betrayal of the hopes of millions. Brexit may not be dead, but the cancer of British party politics will do its damnedest to kill it off.