Who do I blame? Eight reasons we ended up in this Brexit mess

Ian Jack in The Guardian

Who’s to blame? There’s no need to ask for what. The problem is where to start. In history lessons at my Scottish high school, the teacher would first divide the causes of a war or other catastrophe by numbers: 1 for long term and 2 for immediate; and then subdivide those broad categories by capital letters, A and B, and so forth; and further subdivide those categories by Roman numerals, (i) and (ii) and so on; and then subdivide again by small letters, (a) and (b) etc. All of which we would copy into our jotters with our Platignum fountain pens. So that the German gunboat sent to Agadir in 1911 found its place as 1C (ix) (d) under nationalism, colonialism and Franco-German rivalry in the list of underlying reasons for the first world war.

It would be good to crystallise the causes of Brexit in a similar tabulation – to have them pinned down and ranked in order of importance so we could understand how it happened, like a soldier in the Flanders mud at last establishing the chain of events, beginning with the award of Bosnia-Herzegovina to Austria in 1878, that had led to his present awful position.

But there isn’t room for that degree of precision. In any case, it’s hard to be so precise. The reasons that follow mix the broad and the narrow.

1. Deindustrialisation The 1980s changed Britain, most of all above the line between the Wash and the Bristol Channel. Between 1979 and 1986, jobs in the manufacturing industry shrank from 7m to 5.1m. Of all the jobs lost, in services as well as manufacturing, 94% were to the north of that line. Deindustrialisation neither began nor ended in the Thatcher years, but it was under Thatcher’s premiership that shutting down factories, shipyards and mines began to seem like a perverse government ambition rather than the consequence of economic misfortune. Wealth and opportunity moved south. The social ruin was terrible. Skills were lost, traditions ended. Part of what it meant to be British disappeared. What was supposed to happen to places such as Oldham and Paisley? Nobody knew. Worse, it seemed nobody cared.

2. Immigration “Nobody asked us,” said the beleaguered inhabitants of the old industrial settlements, and it was true: nobody had. Nor had anyone explained that we, the natives, would need to think differently about where we lived and the kind of people we were – that integration, if that was the hope, needed adjustments on both sides. Nevertheless, immigration had begun to die as a political issue until, in 2004, Tony Blair’s government decided to open the UK labour market to the eight eastern and central European countries that had joined the EU. Only two other member states, Sweden and Ireland, did so as freely. Between 5,000 and 13,000 migrants were expected; within the first year, 129,000 turned up. Blair and other senior Labour figures later conceded they had made a mistake. “Nobody asked us!” said the people who felt strongly about it. (And then, in June 2016, somebody did ask.)

3. Cultural dementia The phrase is the title of a new book by a historian of modern Europe, Professor David Andress, who argues that France, the US and Britain are all engaged in “particular forms of forgetting, mistaking and misremembering the past”. This is more deadly than straightforward nostalgia, which is a form of homesickness. As a population we are older than we have ever been, but in Andress’s words we seem to be “abandoning the wisdom of maturity for senescent daydreams of recovered youth”, and along the way “stirring up old hatreds, giving disturbing voice to destructive rage and risking the collapse of [our] capacity for decisive, effective and just governance”. An example of the daydreams is the belief that the nations of the old empire are “queuing up” to sign trade deals with the country that once ruled them. Empire 2.0.

4. The Dam Busters Last year, the Sun campaigned for a knighthood to be awarded to the last survivor of the RAF crew who carried out the bouncing-bomb raid in 1943. “Give him a dam gong!” was the front-page headline – an adjectival pun. I was in the local newsagent that morning when a man came in, saw the Sun and shouted passionately: “Yeah, give him a medal. If it weren’t for fuckers like him we’d all be speaking fucking German.” I grew up with war films and saw The Dam Busters when it first came out in 1955. Somehow, for reasons I’ve never seen successfully explained, England’s enthusiasm for the second world war (or an Anglocentric version of it) has grown as the event itself has receded, perpetuating old notions of difference and moral superiority. This leads us to ....

5. English exceptionalism Sitting at the top table of nations, punching above our weight, a freedom-loving people ever ready to fight faceless bureaucracies and red tape (Brussels now, but formerly “the little Hitlers in the town hall”): thanks to these predominantly English ideas, especially popular among Tory party members, the UK has fought an expensive battle against the force of gravity throughout my lifetime. Since the day, in fact, when the foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, wanted an atom bomb with “a bloody great union jack” slapped on the side of it.

6. The playing fields of Eton Their damaging contribution to contemporary British politics includes David Cameron, Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg: a too-confident incompetent, an opportunist and a cartoon version of the ruling class. The first is especially hard to forgive.

  An anti-Brexit campaign bus in London. ‘It would be good to understand how it had happened, like a soldier in the Flanders mud at last establishing the chain of events that led to his awful position.’ Photograph: Jack Taylor/Getty Images

7. The newspapers Graham Robb concludes his recent book about the English-Scottish border, The Debatable Land, by wondering how the Europe referendum could have such different results in contiguous constituencies on either side of the boundary. In the north, 56% voted remain; in the south, 60% voted leave. Migrants are sparse in both places. Robb thinks Scottish voters had been “sensitised” to the benefits of EU membership by the independence referendum of 2014, while on the English side “confusion and ignorance” flourished. Robb blames poor education, but what about the Daily Mail, the Sun and the Telegraph? The electoral influence of newspapers may shrinking now, with their circulations, but they are far more rabid in England than in Scotland, and inform far more of the public debate.

8. Complacency During the Scottish referendum campaign in the summer of 2014 I met a painter and decorator on the island of Bute who said he was voting for Scottish independence. “You have to.” Why? He knew people in Sunderland, “and every one of them wants to leave Europe”. Sunderland, with its big car factory that exported cars to the continent? Surely not. “Yes, they want to leave.” He laughed at the daftness of it. I didn’t believe him.

Overcoming superstition - Persuasion lessons for rationalists

Rahul Siddharthan in The Hindu









The Indian Constitution is unique in listing, among fundamental duties, the duty of each citizen “to develop the scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of inquiry and reform” (Article 51A). Jawaharlal Nehru was the first to use the expression “scientific temper”, which he described with his usual lucidity in The Discovery of India (while also quoting Blaise Pascal on the limits of reason). And yet, decades later, superstitious practices abound in India, including among the highly educated.


Superstition exists

India may be unusual in the degree and variety of superstitious practices, even among the educated, but superstition exists everywhere. In his recent Editorial page article, “Science should have the last word” (The Hindu, February 17), Professor Jayant V. Narlikar, cosmologist and a life-long advocate for rationality, cites Czech astronomer Jiří Grygar’s observation that though the Soviets suppressed superstitious ideas in then-Czechoslovakia during the occupation, superstition arose again in the “free-thinking”, post-Soviet days. Superstition never went away: people just hesitated to discuss it in public.

Similarly, China suppressed superstition and occult practices during Mao Zedong’s rule. But after the economic reforms and relative openness that began in the late 1970s, superstition reportedly made a comeback, with even top party officials consulting soothsayers on their fortunes. In India, the rationalist movements of Periyar and others have barely made a dent. No country, no matter its scientific prowess, has conquered superstition.

On the positive side, internationally, increasing numbers of people live happily without need for superstition. The most appalling beliefs and rituals have largely been eradicated the world over — such as blood-letting in medicine to human sacrifice, and in India, practices such as sati. This is due to the efforts put in by social reform campaigners, education and empowerment (of women in particular). Yet, surviving superstitions can be dangerous too, for example when they contradict medical advice.


Explaining it

Why is it so hard to remove superstitions? Fundamentally, a belief may be difficult to shake off simply because of deep-seated habituation. In his memoir Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, the physicist Richard P. Feynman wrote about being hypnotised voluntarily (hypnosis is always voluntary) on stage, doing what was asked, and thinking to himself that he was just agreeing to everything to not “disturb the situation”. Finally, the hypnotist announced that Feynman would not go straight back to his chair but would walk all around the room first. Feynman decided that this was ridiculous; he would walk straight back to his seat. “But then,” he said, “an annoying feeling came over me: I felt so uncomfortable that I couldn’t continue. I walked all the way around the hall.”

We have all had such “uncomfortable feelings” when trying to do something differently, even if it seems to be logically better: whether it’s a long-standing kitchen practice, or an entrenched approach to classroom teaching, or something else in daily life. Perhaps we are all hypnotised by our previous experiences, and superstition, in particular, is a form of deep-seated hypnosis that is very hard to undo. It is undone only when the harm is clear and evident, as in the medieval practices alluded to earlier. Such beliefs are strengthened by a confirmation bias (giving importance to facts that agree with our preconceptions and ignoring others) and other logical holes. Recent research even shows how seeing the same evidence can simultaneously strengthen oppositely-held beliefs (a phenomenon called Bayesian belief polarisation).


Disagreement in science

Dogmatism about science can be unjustified too. All scientific theories have limitations. Newton’s theories of mechanics and gravitation were superseded by Einstein’s. Einstein’s theory of gravity has no known limitations at the cosmological scale, but is incompatible with quantum mechanics. The evolution of species is an empirical fact: the fossil record attests it, and we can also observe it in action in fast-breeding species. Darwinism is a theory to explain how it occurs. Today’s version is a combination of Darwin’s original ideas, Mendelian genetics and population biology, with much empirical validation and no known failures. But it does have gaps. For example, epigenetic inheritance is not well understood and remains an active area of research. Incidentally, Dr. Narlikar in his article has suggested that Darwinism’s inability to explain the origin of life is a gap. Few evolutionary biologists would agree. Darwin’s book was after all titled The Origin of Species, and the origin of life would seem beyond its scope. But this is an example of how scientists can disagree on details while agreeing on the big picture.

How then does one eradicate superstition? Not, as the evidence suggests, by preaching or legislating against it. Awareness campaigns against dangerous superstitions along with better education and scientific outreach may have some impact but will be a slow process.

Today, the topic of “persuasion” is popular in the psychology, social science and marketing communities. Perhaps scientists have something to learn here too. Pascal, whom Nehru cited on reason, wrote on persuasion too. He observed that the first step is to see the matter from the other person’s point of view and acknowledge the validity of their perception, and then bring in its limitations. “People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come into the mind of others.”

Such a strategy may be more successful than the aggressive campaigns of rationalists such as Richard Dawkins. Nevertheless, “harmless” superstitions are likely to remain with humanity forever.

India's' Rohingya' Problem in Assam?

Michael Safi in The Guardian


Just before midnight on New Year’s Eve, authorities in the north-east Indian state of Assam published a list of 19 million names. But not Hanif Khan’s.

Early the next morning police found Khan, a taxi driver from Cachar district, dead from an apparent suicide. “I am sure he killed himself after he found his name missing,” his wife Rushka says.

Two years ago, Assam, a lush state bordering Bhutan and Bangladesh, embarked on a vast exercise: to identify every resident who could demonstrate roots in the state before March 1971.

And deport anyone who couldn’t.

An unfinished draft was released on 31 December – minus the names of 14 million other residents. Officials have stressed the final list will include millions more names, but the process is sparking anxiety in Assam, and warnings Indiamight be about to manufacture tens of thousands of stateless people.

Khan, 40, had grown increasingly tense in the weeks leading to the publication of the draft. Though he was born in Assam to an Indian mother, his father was an Afghan national who had long since drifted home.

Hanif Khan, a driver from Cachar district in Assam, India, who was found dead on 1 January, 2018. Photograph: Supplied

“He told me many times that the documents he presented to prove he was a citizen of India were perhaps not enough,” his wife said.

Assam is building a new detention centre to process the “foreigners” it plans to evict in the coming years. At least 2,000 people are already detained in six facilities across the state.


Khan often mentioned the detention centres, and had started to panic at the sight of police cars near his home, Rushka says. “He was extremely frightened. Every day he told me that police would arrest him and push him to Bangladesh.”

By December he was skipping meals and turning down driving jobs in unfamiliar places. Five hours before the list was published, his wife says, he vanished.

The eastern Indian border with Bangladesh traverses five states and more than 4,000km. For centuries until the partition of the subcontinent in 1947, human traffic flowed freely across the territory. In smaller numbers, people have continued crossing in the decades after: Indian security agencies estimate about 15 million Bangladesh citizens work and live in India without authorisation.

Just as with porous borders elsewhere, the flow of migrants from Bangladesh inflames Indian passions. Border guards were accused of gunning down nearly 1,000 people, most of them suspected smugglers, in the decade to 2010. A barbed-wire fence, bolstered in parts by floodlights and cameras, has been under construction since the mid-1980s and will eventually stretch more than 3,300km.

Resentment has been most acute in Assam, where it sparked an anti-migrant movement in the 1980s that paralysed the state and eventually won government. It also fuelled one of India’s worst single-day massacres since partition: a frenzied seven-hour pogrom in a clutch of Muslim villages that left at least 1,800 people dead.

“Here, foreigners are like people from a different planet,” says Aman Wadud, a lawyer who represents people accused of migrating illegally.

Assamese residents complain thousands of migrants have found their way onto voting rolls and take jobs and land from locals. “In the past two decades, loads of Muslims from Bangladesh have settled around us,” says Pankaj Saha, a retailer from Dhubri district.

“Twenty years ago, Hindus formed 75% of my town’s population. Today, the Muslims are in majority.”

Proving the identities of more than 30 million people – many bearing handwritten records, or none at all – has fallen to Prateek Hajela, a senior civil servant. “We have received around 65 million documents,” he says from his office in Guwahati, the Assam capital.

The fate of those who fail to win citizenship is outside his control, he says. “What happens to those people who have applied and are not found to be eligible, I can’t say.”

Yet this is the question dogging the process. Tribunals have already declared about 90,000 people in Assam to be foreigners, according to statistics obtained by IndiaSpend, a data journalism initiative.

Only a few dozen have been deported in recent years – Bangladesh and India have no formal repatriation agreement – and officials admit many turn around and return at the first opportunity.


Another 38,000 of those declared to be foreigners in Assam have disappeared into the community, according to police records. Thousands more claim to be wrongly accused and are awaiting citizenship hearings.

The prospect of being suddenly arrested as a foreigner and languishing for years in a detention camp is worrying Bengali Muslims in particular. “There is enormous fear and apprehension in the community,” Wadud says.


Other than Hanif’s, at least two others suicides have been linked to the process. “I am telling people, we need to wait for the second list,” says Subimal Bhattacharjee, an analyst who runs welfare schemes in the state. “A significant number of names will be added. Verification is still going on.”

When the government finally publishes the full list of citizens on 31 May, the ranks of foreigners in Assam could swell by tens of thousands – with no clear plan yet of what to do with them.

The Assam chief minister, Sarbananda Sonowal, said in an interview last month that foreigners would lose constitutional rights. “They will have only one right – human rights as guaranteed by the the UN that include food, shelter and clothing.”

The issue of deportation, he said, “will come later”.

Officials in the Indian home ministry declined to comment on the record but said their expectation was that Bangladesh would take back any of its citizens, as it currently does on a case-by-case basis.

Bangladesh says it is not aware of any citizens living illegally in Assam, and that India has never raised the prospect of mass deportations from the state. An official at the country’s high commission in Delhi confirmed this position was unchanged.

“Deportations will never happen,” Wadud says. “Bangladesh will never accept these people. I can’t imagine what will happen to them. They will become stateless people with no rights whatsoever.”

The Inevitability of Pain and Suffering

Lyrics: Anand Bakshi

Music: Daan Singh

वो तेरे प्यार का ग़म, एक बहाना था सनम अपनी किस्मत ही कुछ ऐसी थी के दिल टूट गया ये ना होता तो कोई दूसरा ग़म होना था मैं तो वो हू जिसे हर हाल में बस रोना था मुस्कुराता भी अगर, तो छलक जाती नज़र अपनी किस्मत ही कुछ ऐसी थी के दिल टूट गया वर्ना क्या बात है तू कोई सितमगर तो नही तेरे सीनेमें भी दिल है, कोई पत्थर तो नही तूने ढाया है सितम, तो यही समझेंगे हम अपनी किस्मत ही कुछ ऐसी थी के दिल टूट गया

Imran Khan on his third marriage

Im The Dim in The Friday Times







From hat on head, to dupatta on brow, to naqab on face, I have been through several lives and several wives. I have finally reached the pineapple of nirvana because I have seen the light. I might however see a few more lights, now and then. But for the moment, I am delighted to announce my wedding, which took place on January 1, er sorry I meant February whatever, witnessed by my closest comrades, whose names escape me. And Pinky’s mum and five kids, whose names escape me.

Unlike my previous marriages, this is an everlasting bond, not bondage. Henceforward, kinks will be replaced by Pinks. And good times will be replaced by Godly times. Above all, Pink is the new Black.

Back to politics: the best thing Nawaz Sharif can now do is to leave Pakistan for another decade or so. He should leave governance to me. I have some very creative ideas on how to tackle the budget deficit. I will get hefty sponsorships for everything, especially great state institutions. Hence forward, it will be Sunsilk General Headquarters, Bahria National Assembly, Rose Petal Pakistan Navy, Coca Cola National Accountability Bureau, Masterfoam Supreme Court, Pepsi Election Commission and so on. There will be a huge influx of money from these sponsorships and the deficit will go up in a puff of smoke, unlike me who’s stopped puffing and smoking and am in the Pink of health as a result.

I’ve now gone so thoroughly native that I’ve dropped all my old friends in London. The editor of Tatler, Lady Patricia Pitbull-Terrier called to interview me about my new marriage but I didn’t take her call. Then she got her secretary Eliza Dolittle to ring, no response from me. Then she got her hairdresser Vidal Sassoon to call, no response from me. Then she got her photographer the late Cecil Beaton to call me, still no response. Finally, she got my old friend Mick Jagger to call me and try and make conversation by asking what I thought of Teresa May’s new Abortion Bill, “Oh for God’s sake, Mick, just pay it!”

Zombie companies walk among us

Tim Harford in The Financial Times


For vampires, the weakness is garlic. For werewolves, it’s a silver bullet. And for zombies? Perhaps a rise in interest rates will do the trick. 

Economists have worried about “zombie companies” for decades. Timothy Taylor, editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, has followed a trail of references back to 1989, noting sightings of these zombies in Japan from the 1990s, and more recently in China. The fundamental concern is that there are companies which should be dead, yet continue to lumber on, ruining things for everyone. 

It’s a vivid metaphor — perhaps a little too vivid — and it is likely to be tested over the months and years to come if, as almost everyone expects, central banks continue to raise interest rates back to what veterans might describe as “normal”. 

Claudio Borio of the Bank for International Settlements recently gave a speech in which he worried about the tendency of low interest rates to sustain zombie companies. Mr Borio has consistently been concerned about the distorting effects of low interest rates, but the zombie element of his argument adds a new twist.

Researchers at both the BIS and the OECD, the club of wealthy nations, have found evidence that low interest rates seem conducive to the existence of zombies, which they define as older companies that don’t make enough money to service their debts. As interest rates have fallen around the world, such zombies have become more prevalent and have also shown more endurance. 

On average, across the US, Japan, Australia and western Europe, the proportion of firms that are zombies has risen fivefold since 1987, from 2 to 10 per cent. The zombies walk among us. 

Why should we worry? One obvious answer is that zombies absorb resources. If a zombie retailer occupies a space on the high street, that makes it harder and more expensive for a start-up or a successful competitor to move in. The same goes for any resource from advertising space to electricity, and of course it goes for staff, too. 

We would usually expect a thriving company to be able to outbid the walking dead for anything necessary, from a finance director to a unit in an industrial estate. But the status quo always has a certain power, and in some cases, the zombie might be at an unfair advantage. 

Consider a zombie bank, propped up by a government guarantee but basically insolvent. Gambling on resurrection, it tries to expand by offering high rates to depositors and cheap loans to creditors. In the late 1980s, Joseph Stiglitz — later to win a Nobel memorial prize in economics — proposed a “Gresham’s law” of savings-and-loan associations based on this tendency: bad associations crowd out good ones. 

More recently, the collapse of Carillion, a large British outsourcing and construction firm, showed a similar dynamic. The more Carillion struggled, the more desperate it became to win new business — which meant aggressive bids in competitive auctions, dooming Carillion while starving competitors of business. 

Having written an entire book about the importance of failure, I am naturally sympathetic to Mr Borio’s argument. Modern economies have a low failure rate — probably too low. Still, one should not be too cavalier about this point. To ordinary ears, bankruptcy sounds unambiguously bad. If you spend too much time thinking about zombie firms and economic dynamism, bankruptcy starts to sound unambiguously good. 

Cut down those zombies and let highly productive new firms grow in the rich soil, fertilised by those zombie corpses, sounds like — forgive the play on words — a no-brainer. But should we really be so pleased that so many of the UK’s coal mines, or the auto suppliers of Detroit, have been successfully killed off? If nothing has replaced them, there is nothing to celebrate. 

One of the lessons of recent economic research by economists David Autor, David Dorn and Gordon Hanson has been that productive new firms do not necessarily spring up as we might have hoped. Mr Autor and his colleagues have, in a series of influential papers, tracked local areas subject to the sudden shock of competition from imported Chinese products. Their conclusion: recovery is neither quick nor automatic. 

Nor is it always easy for laid-off workers to stroll into fresh jobs: if you have worked for several years stitching soft toys, then the obvious next step when the toy factory lays you off is to start stitching shirts or trousers instead. Unfortunately, that is also the obvious next move for the importers, or the robots. 

We can make a long list of policies that might help new productive firms to get started and expand: education, infrastructure, flexible regulations, small-business finance and so on. There is some evidence in favour of these policies, but no checklist can guarantee results. 

Still, that is where to focus our attention as the zombies start to expire. The easier it is to start a new idea, the more hard-nosed we can be about killing off the old ones. It is necessary that the zombies must die, but that cannot be where the story ends.

How to stop Brexit

Simon Kuper in The Financial Times



I’m not a natural activist, because I’m too pessimistic, but the other evening I helped gather some stop-Brexit people in a room in London. Much as I love them, they looked like a Daily Mail cartoon of the cosmopolitan elite. Going home on the bus afterwards, I read The Daily Telegraph’s story that the whole event had been funded by international investor George Soros (obviously no offshore plutocrats backed Leave). In fact, though, Stoppers come in several mutually suspicious groups, only one of which is financed by Soros. Most Stoppers are highly self-motivated. One man told me: “I want to be able to tell my children later that at least I tried to block it.” 

You’d think Stoppers have no chance. Flawed though the Brexit referendum was, everyone agreed its rules in advance. After Leave’s victory, most Britons almost instantly switched off. Since July 2016, Google searches for Manchester United (or for Chelsea or Arsenal football clubs) have always outnumbered those for Brexit. Yet Stoppers finally feel they can win, perhaps this autumn. I think their best chance will be in 2020. 

This autumn, parliament will vote on the government’s “withdrawal agreement” with Europe. MPs won’t vote the bill down. Most think they lack the legitimacy to stop Brexit, since “the people” have spoken. However, MPs might just vote for a second referendum that gives voters final approval over the terms of withdrawal. Labour’s leader Jeremy Corbyn is a Brexiter, but he knows his party is now overwhelmingly Remain. “Crablike, he’s moving in that direction,” says Andrew Adonis, a chief Stopper and former Labour minister. If Labour and 20 Conservative MPs vote for a referendum, that’s probably enough. The EU would give Britain time to hold one, because it’s committed to letting each state follow its democratic processes before enacting a treaty. 

Meanwhile, Stoppers are trying to shift public opinion through mostly youth-led campaigns. Already, polls since last summer show a consistent if slight lead for Remain over Leave. Now Stoppers need to persuade voters they aren’t simply the liberal elite, says Adonis. That means promising radical policies to help left-behinds. 

The problem is that a narrow win for Stop in a second referendum would hardly put the Brexit issue to bed. Anyway, the EU probably wouldn’t halt Brexit to readmit a divided UK. 

But even if the withdrawal bill passes parliament, the fight continues. The key point is that the bill will be almost content-free. The government cannot say what kind of Brexit it wants, because then it would split. So the bill, after its thrilling front page (“The UK will leave the EU on March 29 2019”), will be just another fudge. It will say something like: “After a two-year transition, we will leave the single market (though possibly not the customs union), having negotiated new arrangements giving us full access to European markets.” 

But everyone knows Britain can only have full access by staying in the single market. So the bill will simply delay to 2021 the unanswerable question: what kind of Brexit does Britain want? The issues will be the same as today: a hard Brexit would cause economic pain, and could be vetoed by the Irish Republic. A soft Brexit would anger hard Brexiters. 

From March 2019 through 2021, the UK will have officially left the EU, but won’t have chosen its future status. Meanwhile, during the transition, it will remain in the single market and customs union, and keep paying into the EU budget, only without any say in European decisions. 

Nobody will like that. So, in 2020, Stoppers can say: “You’ve been negotiating Brexit for four years and got nowhere. Meanwhile, demographic change means the electorate is now clearly Remain. How about a second referendum on whether to jump off the cliff?” 

Reversing Brexit in 2020 would be logistically doable given that the UK would never have abandoned European rules. Northern European states — led by Ireland and the Netherlands — would press for Britain’s readmission. The EU would demand guarantees that Britons wouldn’t try Brexit again for a generation. It could then trumpet Brexit’s failure as proof that there’s no life outside the EU. 

There’s a third, more painful scenario in which the Stoppers ultimately win. This entails the UK achieving a genuine Brexit. The day Brexit happens, the British political argument changes. For now, all the country’s problems are blamed on Brussels and immigrants. After Brexit, all problems will be blamed on Brexit, even if they have nothing to do with it. The Stoppers — by then Reversers — will ask every day: “Where are the sunny uplands that the Brexiters promised?” 

Rejoining the EU should be feasible given that the EU is already reluctantly starting to accept that it’s not a union but several coalitions of states, each moving at different speeds. The divides between countries such as Finland, Hungary and Italy are simply too big to permit unity. A returning UK could rejoin the northern ring of anti-federalist states, stay outside the Schengen passport-free zone and the euro, and finally try tackling its real problems.