Brexit. Why do Brits want Out of the EU?

Now Boris Johnson’s gone, all but the most hardened of leavers have been forced to see through those rosy visions of life outside the EU

ast week, having whiled away two joyous days at the Tories’ conference in Birmingham, I spent a long afternoon an hour’s drive away, in the cathedral city of Worcester. The plan was to sample the mood of the kind of place once considered to hold the key to British elections: remember “Worcester woman”, the swing-voting stereotype talked up in the New Labour years? But I was also there to gather more evidence of how much the UK’s current woes are affecting the kind of average-to-affluent places that might once have weathered any economic storm.

Not entirely surprisingly, people said they were worried and scared. Some talked about grownup children suddenly terrified that a mortgage is beyond their reach; others described a new and unsettling habit of using sparing amounts of gas and electricity. The autumn’s increasingly awful mood music – from talk of cancelled local Christmas markets to the possibility of three-hour power cuts – informed just about every conversation I had.

Mention of politics drew some very interesting responses indeed. “I just miss Boris,” said Julie, who works at the city-centre branch of Boots, and told me she had long since got used to conversations with her customers about the impossibility of their living costs. As she and a few other people saw it, Johnson had successfully managed the Covid vaccination programme, and brought some pizzazz and humour to the boring world of politics, which had now reverted to type. They also voiced something I have heard a few times lately: a belief that he had represented the last hope of Brexit somehow opening the way to a happier and more prosperous country, a dream that died when he left Downing Street.

Clearly, that is a very generous opinion of a man who told just as many self-serving lies about leaving the EU as he did about most other things. At the heart of some lingering fondness for him, perhaps, is a lot of people’s refusal to admit how much they were duped. But that view of life before and after Johnson highlights something that is now settling among all but the most hardened Brexit supporters: a quiet, slightly tortured realisation that all those optimistic visions of life outside the EU are not going to materialise, even if the crises triggered by Vladimir Putin eventually subside.

British people being British people, this is not yet a matter of any widespread anger. Though they probably ought to, no one is about to charge into the streets and demand any kind of Brexit reckoning. But if you want to understand the current political moment – and some of the reasons why the Conservatives have so suddenly and spectacularly imploded – here is a strangely overlooked part of the story.

Whoever people blame for our current predicament, one vivid fact is inescapable. The future that 17 million voters bought into six years ago has now collapsed into its precise opposite. In the summer of 2016, let us not forget, Johnson, Michael Gove and the former Labour MP Gisela Stuart jointly put their names to an article in the Sun which insisted that once Brexit happened, “the NHS will be stronger, class sizes smaller and taxes lower. We’ll have more money to spend on our priorities, wages will be higher and fuel bills will be lower.”

A year later, Jacob Rees-Mogg – who still seems to be trying to sniff out undiscovered “Brexit opportunities” – assured anyone who would listen that leaving the EU would open the way to much cheaper food, and therefore increase people’s disposable income. Brexit is not the only thing that has revealed the impossibility of those dreams, but that is not quite the point: making promises like that was both stupid and dangerous, and we are now starting to live with the consequences.

For Liz Truss and her government, post-Brexit politics is proving to be impossible. They want life outside the EU to mean Darwinian economics, public spending cuts and a smaller welfare state – which is not what millions of leave supporters thought they were voting for in the 2016 referendum, nor what the Tories offered in the two elections that followed. Meanwhile, trying to wriggle out of Brexit’s endless constraints in pursuit of growth threatens to tie the government in knots. Suella Braverman, a home secretary who embodies all of modern Conservatism’s nastiness and introversion, says she wants to cut net migration to “tens of thousands”. But Downing Street has been signalling that it wants to liberalise the UK’s immigration system, a move that would definitely send a certain kind of Brexit voter into paroxysms of fury. Everything is a mess because the logic of Truss and her allies’ position cannot hold: as the Brexit revolution that upturned Conservative politics and brought them to power unravels, the reason for their success is also a guarantee of their failure.

Given its longstanding refusal to question our exit from the EU, Keir Starmer’s Labour party faces some comparable contradictions, but seems to be tentatively trying to find a way through. One of the most fascinating moments of the past two weeks of political theatre happened during Starmer’s conference speech in Liverpool, when Starmer actually mentioned the B word, and tentatively talked about what Brexit’s calamities mean for people’s view of politics. Many who voted for Brexit, he said, did so because they wanted “democratic control over their lives … opportunities for the next generation, communities they felt proud of, public services they could rely on”. This was a slightly rose-tinted reading of recent history, but it just about rang true. He added: “Whether you voted leave or remain, you’ve been let down.” His claim that he will somehow make Brexit work still sounds deeply questionable, but this is a start: an acknowledgment, at least, of the lies and cynicism that got us here.

Whether mounting disappointment and resentment will simply mean a neat switch from the Tories to Labour is another matter. The untruths Tony Blair told about the Iraq war eventually played their part in the huge crisis of public trust that led on to Brexit, and the endless political flux that followed it. Now, 2016’s deceits are being revealed in an even more toxic political environment, awash with conspiracy theory and polarisation. Anyone who assumes that a mood of cynicism, fear and dashed hopes will put politics the correct way up ought to maybe think about recent events in Italy, Sweden and France – and, closer to home, that instant nostalgia for the reckless, authoritarian style of leadership that Johnson combined with his more showbiz aspects. Once Truss is out of the way, the ultimate Brexit paradox may yet materialise: a horrific boost for the very kind of politics its failure ought to have killed stone dead.

Project hit by fall in labour supply and rise in costs, and investigation launched over low visitor numbers

For some, the whole project was supposed to be a celebration of Britain’s departure from the EU. Which means there is more than a little irony in the fact a main concern of the “festival of Brexit” organisers was the impact of leaving itself.

Disruption to the supply of workers and materials, as well as increased costs, emerged as one of the risks overshadowing the project, according to records.

The £120m festival was controversial from the moment it was first announced by Theresa May in 2018, but this week was in the firing line once again after the spending watchdog said it is investigating – after a series of rebrandings – Unboxed: Creativity in the UK amid concern visitor numbers were less than 1% of early targets.

Though the festival failed to win over many who voted remain in 2016, some in the arts sector are suspicious the latest attacks have been led by Tory politicians, with some already on record as being unhappy at an apparent drift from the original idea of a post-Brexit festival that would showcase “the best of British creativity”.

Days after Julian Knight, the Tory chair of the Commons culture committee, said the project had been a “catastrophic failure”, its organisers remained guarded while there was no sign of its chief creative officer, the arts impresario Martin Green.

Among the few festival partners to speak out in defence of the festival was Liz Pugh of the outdoor arts organisation, Walk the Plank, who argued that the festival’s legacy and true value would become apparent in the longer term and would outweigh the current focus on spending.

“At the moment there is a feeling that the bean counters are not happy with how many beans there are, and that roots it very much in a financial and economic framework. Of course there needs to be accountability and value for public money, but we should allow for the other benefits as well,” said Pugh. Her company was involved in the production of 20 large-scale outdoor artworks in secret locations across outstanding landscapes.

The festival, which runs until mid November, was unprecedented in the way arts companies had come together with collaborators in science and technology, creating internships and roles for students in the midst of a pandemic, she said, adding that they wouldn’t have anything to do with it if it had been about Brexit.

“I think that in years to come there will be many exciting things happening in the arts, and beyond, that came out of conversations that started during Unboxed,” said Pugh.

Phil Batty, executive director of Unboxed, also pushed back agains Knight’s claims, adding: “The project isn’t an unmitigated disaster. It has really gone out of its way to engage people in all corners of the UK.”

Like others involved in the £120m project, Batty believes there will be a strong success story to tell the National Audit Office (NAO) – as well as a legacy in the form of job creation and investment across the arts sector – even if its efforts were hampered by being associated with Brexit.

“From the outset, it was never designed to be a Brexit festival – that was never in a brief we were given. We were set two objectives by all the governments of the UK. The first was to bring people together. The second was to celebrate creativity,” he added. Batty reiterated final visitor numbers will be far in excess of the figure of 240,000 frequently cited this week as the number that had visited events.

Brexit appears at no point in the published minutes of meetings convened over the past two years by the festival’s board of committees and audit committee – though it makes an indirect appearance in those from a meeting in September last year, which state: “A new risk around logistics including purchasing commodities form the EU and the changing macro environment was identified including supply chain, tech and production, goods like timber, technology chips and labour market.”

Other minutes show organisers continued to monitor a range of risks to the project, though only a sliver of the discussions are recorded. Those from a meeting in April last year, referred to the festival’s branding, stating: “It was noted that there are political sensitives to be considered.”

Minutes from a meeting last January refer to “reputational risk” concerning the “geographic spread” of live events, but add: “All committee members felt the conversation to debate new locations had passed and would now be a distraction from delivery. The chair would inform the board that the focus is now on reach of current activity.”

Other records, such as a list of big ticket areas of expenditure which will be a focus of the NAO investigation, show how the project was a boon for a small group of consultants, particularly those working in branding, advertising and marketing.

I have spent two decades studying the dynamics of social crisis and societal collapse. It’s now clear to me that Prime Minister Liz Truss is leading Britain into a convergence of crises that is likely to culminate in an unprecedented social and economic collapse that cascades across the government, economy, housing markets, energy, health, the judiciary and beyond.

Worse, these crises risk triggering a global financial crisis bigger in scale than the 2008 crash – one that, like that crash, could have potentially irreversible impacts on global civilisation.

The sacking of her Chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, after 38 days in office, is unlikely to significantly reverse these prospects. In fact, it signals a systemic level of incoherence the only outcome of which, at this stage, can be continued breakdown. The danger is that, as this Government collapses, it brings the rest of Britain down with it.

Systems collapse when they are unable to adapt to change. The policies of the Truss Government are not only accelerating conditions of change beyond the capability of British institutions to adapt, they are generating crises across multiple institutions simultaneously in such a way that they are overwhelming the overall system’s abilities to respond.

When a system is overwhelmed in this way, we start to rapidly run out of options within the existing framework. The more it moves in different directions to quell the crisis, the more it inadvertently stokes the crisis. As a result, the system itself becomes an accelerator of its own collapse – and this is exactly the predicament that the Truss team has managed to pull Britain into.

These ingredients are critical preconditions for the collapse of complex societies. Such collapses have taken place over decades, in some cases centuries, in others. While collapse doesn’t necessarily entail the complete evisceration of a society, it involves a breakdown of institutional complexity. This results in a loss of societal capabilities, potentially entailing reductions in living standards and population.

Liz Truss’ agenda is accelerating the risk of such a collapse in a way that is unprecedented. While, to some extent, this can be explained by a penchant for disaster capitalism designed to benefit elites at everyone’s expense, the deeper problem is that the Truss Government appears to be fundamentally incapable of grappling with complexity.

It doesn’t realise that our systems are tightly coupled in complex ways; that these interconnections mean you cannot tinker with one element of the system without upending the entire system; that pulling the rug out from under critical institutions or public services can unravel social cohesion in a way that could generate chronic instability from which there is no easy recovery – leading to a spiral of escalating costs and diminishing returns.

Britain is on the brink of spiralling out of control.

The Economy

Perhaps most alarming of all is the risk of global financial collapse. The Truss Government has failed to recognise that its actions are accelerating the risk of such a collapse – the knock-on effects of which would feedback into the British economy and crush all hopes of economic growth. The belated U-turns are too little, too late.

According to Nigel Green, CEO of the Devere Group – one of the world’s leading independent financial advisory firms – the “fallout” from the UK Government’s failure to ensure stability “could spread to impact the wider global financial markets, which themselves are sitting on incredibly thin ice as liquidity disappears”.

He told Byline Times that a lack of a credible, long-term commitment, from both the UK Government and the Bank of England to calming markets “has already blown up the UK bond mark, the mortgage market, UK pensions, amongst others”.

The International Monetary Fund has already predicted slowdown in global growth which will feel like a recession for millions around the world by 2023.

“The crisis in the UK, the world’s sixth-largest economy, and with a reserve currency, could be a catalyst to accelerate or deepen global economic woes,” said Green. “Fear is contagious. Increased bond turbulence in the UK triggered by fund liquidations fuels a sell-off of the pound amid heightened instability, which in turn drives UK stock outflows, which prompts similar sell-offs across international markets.

“Considering the close crossovers of regions when it comes to macro issues such as soaring inflation, slowing growth and tightening monetary policy, markets often extrapolate – especially when there is political change in places, such as Italy, for example.

“It’s clear that the Bank of England have a foot on the brake, and Liz Truss on the accelerator. Unfortunately, this could result in a crash, potentially damaging others as it rolls.”

In this way, the tug-of-war between Truss and the central bank shouldn’t be seen as a scuffle isolated to the British isles. It could have ripple effects across the global financial system.

Private and public debt as a share of global GDP is now at record levels, approaching $300 trillion. It has risen from 200% in 1999 to 350% today. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development is already forecasting that rapid interest rate increases and fiscal tightening is “pushing the world towards global recession and prolonged stagflation, inflicting worse damage than the financial crisis in 2008 and the COVID-19 shock in 2020”.

The escalating incoherence of the Government’s economic, financial and monetary policies is intensifying this trajectory. And since the 2008 financial crash, the world has largely run out of road for dealing with such a crisis. After 12 years of quantitative easing to ease the crisis, the room for further borrowing without escalating risk is greatly diminished.

The Housing Market

This can be clearly seen in the knock-on effects on the housing market. With interest rates spiking to help deal with inflation, mortgage rates are soaring. This, in turn, will lead house prices to fall. Both of these factors will dramatically increase the threat that consumers default on their mortgages.

If house prices fall below the value of the mortgage, even while mortgage repayments become unaffordable, this negative equity could result in more people pushed out of the housing market, further reducing housing demand, prices and confidence.

The result would be a deepening economic contraction that increases the severity of a recession. At worse, a collapse in housing markets could trigger further debt-defaults across the consumer sector culminating in a wider debt crisis.

That too would compound the decline in confidence and potentially trigger further crises across the financial system – not just in the UK, but potentially across the world.

The Truss economic agenda has now made the prospect of a housing market collapse that sparks wider contagion much more probable. But, at this point, the economic toolbox is empty – the market is demanding extreme austerity to balance public finances which would escalate the cost of living crisis and drive tens of millions of people into poverty. Yet, if public spending is maintained, the markets will remain in turmoil.

In other words, whichever direction the economy now moves in will result in crisis.

Energy

The Government’s response to the energy crisis is compounding these economic and financial risks. This crisis is being driven by our fundamental dependence on fossil fuels – but, instead of moving to rapidly end this dependence, the Truss strategy has been to cement it.

The problem is that this approach ties the UK to the most expensive sources of energy, which are rapidly declining in quality. The Truss Government’s decision to focus on ramping up North Sea Oil production and fracking make no economic sense, because their costs of production are increasing even as their actual production levels are declining.

Meanwhile, the Government is trying to destroy renewable energy growth with windfall taxes on solar and wind companies (but not for fossil fuel polluters), while also pursuing legislation to block solar installations in farmland – despite the fact that solar and wind are now nine times cheaper than gas.

The UK’s energy strategy is locking the country into dependence on increasingly expensive energy resources that are facing economic obsolescence as early as 2030. As energy is the bedrock of all economic activity, this is a recipe that will guarantee economic decline.

The Collapse of Critical Services

In a complex system, we can expect the unexpected. But these escalating crises are generating further institutional breakdowns that, in turn, could lead to consequences that are difficult to anticipate.

Due to declining pay, pension arrangements and working conditions as the cost of living crisis has intensified, public service workers across the spectrum are in revolt.

A survey by the British Medical Association of more than 7,700 hospital consultants has shown that nearly half – 44% – are planning to leave the NHS next year. According to Dr Vishal Sharma, chair of the BMA consultants committee, the exodus means that “the NHS is in danger of complete collapse”.

The transport system is also reeling, with bus, rail and London Underground strikes now a regular feature of British national life. Postal workers are now joining the fray. With little prospect of pay rising in line with inflation, there is little prospect of strike action diminishing. Instead, such disruptions are bound to become worse and more frequent, and will likely become more widespread than the industrial action seen in the 1970s.

Similar challenges are facing the judicial system. The cost of living crisis drove criminal barristers to strike over low pay. Although a sub-par deal was reached, the profession is still in massive decline with fewer and fewer joining, and increasing numbers leaving for better jobs elsewhere.

The strikes have massively compounded bottlenecks piling up in the criminal justice system, creating a backlog of cases stretching over years, and no clear solution to catching up with them. As the backlog gets bigger, the expected decline in the profession could grind the system to a halt if key reforms are not pursued. Which is partly why in September, the Law Society warned that the criminal justice system was on the brink of “collapse” without funding all parts of it equally.

A Vicious Cycle

As the costs of running the system escalates, returns are diminishing. Every response to these crises only creates greater costs and complexity – and a new layer of problems. This, in turn, requires further responses involving more costs and complexity. This cycle increasingly reduces the capacity of the system to respond, accelerating its trajectory toward collapse.

At this point, the chances of averting collapse become smaller and smaller – because if the crises are simply ignored, the system collapses anyway.

The Truss Government has locked itself into this vicious cycle and is increasingly out of control. The sacking of the Chancellor is a symptom of this escalating incoherence, not a sign that it is changing course to become more coherent.

Many of these crises were bound to happen one way or another at some point. Twelve years of austerity involving constant cuts to public services laid the groundwork. The global energy crisis, escalated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, accelerated the impact of austerity and brought forward these crises.

Yet, the Truss Government, driven by an unwavering belief in a narrow economic ideology – which I have argued amounts to a social Darwinistic distortion of neoliberalism – has thrown petrol on the flames without realising that its approach is at risk of burning everything to the ground.

Amid all this, the growing incoherence inside the Government – replete with U-turns, infighting and a disjointed Cabinet that is losing the support of its own parliamentary party – demonstrates the scale of the political crisis. The Government is imploding and this is further diminishing its decision-making capacity to respond coherently to mounting internal and external crises.

Over the coming months, we are going to witness an acceleration of interconnected political, social and economic crises which strike at the heart of Britain’s social fabric, and strain critical institutions and services – energy, transport, housing, food, health, criminal justice, policing and beyond.

The Government has created a national emergency with devastating consequences that will be long-lasting. And it must be recognised that this perfect storm was avoidable. And that it can be fixed – but not within the constraints of our current system.

Because it is now clear that the Truss Government is incapable of doing anything other than stoking the flames of crisis. The collapse of British Conservatism is well underway. But the next Labour Government is going to inherit a bigger and more intractable crisis than the 2008 crash – a comprehensive crisis in which every sector of British society experiences a breakdown, with a destructive impact on the lives of citizens. This is why it is a form of societal collapse.

If Labour is going to successfully lead the country through this unprecedented crisis, it will need to be fully focused on system transformation; ready to think, see and plan holistically; and armed with the capability to recognise and respond to complexity. If it fails to do so, this could herald an even deeper political crisis.

Trade from the UK to the EU is down 16% on the levels anticipated had Brexit not happened, a new report has found.

Meanwhile trade from the EU to the UK has dropped even further, by 20%, relative to a scenario in which Brexit had not occurred, according to research published on Wednesday by the Economic and Social Research Institute.

Using UK and EU data it found that measuring the impact of Brexit on UK-EU trade can give varied results depending on the data source and the comparison group used.

The report, How has Brexit changed EU-UK trade flows?, found the impact of Brexit on EU-UK trade does not appear that large if compared to UK trade with the rest of the world, as global exports from Britain had been growing slowly. But when the UK’s trade with the rest of the world was compared with the EU’s faster-growing performance with more than 200 trading partners, the picture showed a marked difference.

The analysis, based on monthly HMRC and country-level Eurostat data, found “a substantial reduction in the number of products traded from the UK to the EU”.

The ESRI said the goods trade between the EU and UK had increased following a sharp fall in the early months of 2021.

Trade has recovered to most of its pre-2021 level in value terms. However, it remains significantly below what it might otherwise have been if it had followed the same growth rate as other trade partners.

The ESRI noted that global exports of goods from the UK have been growing slowly – a trend it said may have been partly the result of “Brexit spill-over” effects on supply chains. It said for most countries across the EU, the size of the impact of Brexit was broadly similar for both exports and imports.

Peter Norris, the Virgin group chair and co-convener of the Brexit monitoring group, the UK Trade and Business Commission, said “recovering lost trade with Europe should be a top priority” as the country enters a recession.

“The government can do this by removing the barriers to trade which Brexit created,” he added.

Ireland stands out as having had a particularly large reduction in imports from the UK relative to its other international trade patterns, according to the ESRI.

Spare a thought for Channel 4 News presenter, Krishnan Guru-Murthy, whose standout moment on a potential fateful day in politics was not for a viral polemic but for a viral on-air blunder in which he was heard off-camera calling the Northern Ireland minister and arch-Brexiteer Steve Baker a “****”.

Guru-Murthy was forced to apologise “unreservedly” to Baker after swearing at him in an “unguarded moment”.

The broadcaster said the remark followed a “robust interview” with Baker but it was “beneath the standards I set myself”.

Six years on from the Brexit referendum, continental commentators have become used to Westminster meltdowns, but many see in the latest cataclysm the finale of a project that was always divorced from reality.

For the French newspaper Libération, there is “decidedly something rancid in the Tories’ tea”. The paper’s former London correspondent Sonia Delesalle-Stolper said Westminster, a “temple of democracy and ancient traditions”, had witnessed “bewildering” scenes.

“Blows, shoves, insults, resignations, tears … After some implausible incidents in both the Commons and Downing Street, the British government and the Conservative party seem to be on a path to total self-destruction,” she said.

Like most European papers, Libération looked past the spectacle to what it saw as the root cause of the chaos. “In four months, the country will have had four chancellors, two interior ministers, and no doubt soon two prime ministers,” it said.

“Who will be Liz Truss’s successor, since her imminent departure is no longer in doubt? That’s the question. For Brexit – and its chief artisan, Boris Johnson – has successfully drained the Conservative party of all substance and competence.”

Of Wednesday’s events, Le Monde said Suella Braverman’s departure as home secretary and “concerns over the government’s direction” were clearly “bad news for Liz Truss, who is seeking to regain control after the huge tax cuts she had promised were shredded”.

More fundamentally, it also blamed Brexit. “British governments since Brexit have demonstrated with ever greater talent that leaving the EU only takes Britain further away from the promised land of recovered sovereignty and untrammelled freedom,” wrote Sylvain Kahn.

“‘Take back control!’, they said. But the British are a very long way from doing that. No other EU member is in such a state … Since Brexit, Britain’s Conservative leaders have done all they could to prove that EU membership was far from the problem.”

Annette Dittert, the London correspondent for the German public broadcaster ARD, noted that Truss was “now the third Conservative leader, after Theresa May and Boris Johnson, to fail to deliver on Brexit promises”.

She argued that future historians would find the roots of British politics’ “current insanity” in 2016. “Firstly, because Brexit has damaged the UK economy so lastingly that any extra market uncertainty leads to far greater turbulence than ever before. Secondly, because Brexit and the inherent magical thinking of a sovereign UK that can go its own way in the globalised 21st-century world, detached from international developments, marked the beginning of the end of rational thinking on the island.”

Truss’s “dramatic failure”, Dittert concluded, “could now spell the end of that wishful thinking – the beginning of something of a British turning point”.

In Die Zeit, Bettina Schulz said Truss’s imminent political demise could be a key moment. “The extreme ideological project of the neoliberal group within the Conservative party has failed,” perhaps heralding “one of the most important turning points in the country since the Brexit vote in 2016”, she said.

Jochen Buchsteiner took the same line in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. “Despite Brexit, there are limits to what a British government can do,” he said. “Policies that are – as a veteran Tory put it – ‘irrational nonsense’ remain unenforceable even after Brexit.”

In a comment article titled “And Britain broke” in Spain’s El País, Ángel Ubide said the UK’s long tradition of “bureaucratic and diplomatic efficiency, and the advantage of a universal language” had given it “an aura of credibility”. But he continued: “Everything has its limit. The pro-Brexit coalition captured the British political establishment in 2016, and has slowly eroded that credibility until, as almost always happens, it suddenly ran out.”

La Vanguardia’s London correspondent, Rafael Ramos, waxed philosophical. “In literature and art, absurdism is the tendency to avoid the constraints of the logical, shun experience and reality, and give oneself over to the irrational and the arbitrary,” he wrote. “In politics, this is what we’re seeing in the UK, a country where the markets have intervened, a humiliated prime minister has had to perform a U-turn, and the de facto leader is the chancellor who has lost two party leadership elections.”

El Confidencial’s Celia Maza was blunter still, suggesting the UK was once again in danger of becoming “the sick man of Europe”. Truss “has been in Downing Street for just over a month, but her situation is totally unsustainable,” she said.

Denmark’s Politiken described an atmosphere of “chaos and panic”, while in Italy – to whose habitual political chaos the Economist this week compared the UK’s – Corriere della Sera concluded that however the saga ended, Britain’s credibility had collapsed.

Luigi Ippolito wrote that the debacle, compared by some to the Suez crisis and the end of Britain’s imperial ambitions, “has unmasked the post-Brexit illusion of being a totally sovereign nation that can ignore international realities. No one is an island any more.”

Wait till Boris gets back in.

Very few of them seem to have a national/international big picture vision.