Politics1 min read

A decade of magical thinking since Brexit has taught me that it’s always OK to hope for better | Zoe Williams

By · Via The Guardian Politics · Published by Everything Blog

In short

The arguments defining the post-Brexit landscape have fundamentally changed as proponents drop original pledges regarding reclaimed sovereignty and immigration fixes. Instead, defenders now claim that the pro-European movement is crippled by competing priorities such as youth mobility, trade restoration, and climate action. Proponents counter that these various objectives work together effectively rather than undermining their shared platform. Meanwhile, attempts to use continental civic unrest as a justification for detachment ignore shared crises like housing shortages and economic austerity.

Key points

  • Isolationist strategies fail to insulate the United Kingdom from international crises suc…: Isolationist strategies fail to insulate the United Kingdom from international crises such as the rising cost of living and wartime instability.
  • Pro-European advocates argue that varied priorities like security cooperation and environ…: Pro-European advocates argue that varied priorities like security cooperation and environmental policies complement rather than diminish each other.
  • Brexit defenders increasingly rely on political unrest across the European continent to a…: Brexit defenders increasingly rely on political unrest across the European continent to argue in favor of keeping distance from the bloc.

Sources checked by our analysis pipeline: 1

However sunny your disposition, it wears you down, 10 straight years of being asked to accept facts about Brexit that aren’t true: 52% as an “overwhelming majority”; a flaky, half-baked referendum as the endpoint of purest democracy; the severance of a complicated trading and geopolitical relationship that took decades to build as the dawn of a new prosperity. All such nonsense, all delivered with such conviction, by such a wide variety of sources, many of them self-describing as impartial, that in the end you just surrender to it. None of it magically becomes true, don’t be silly. It’s more that you come to accept that everyone else talks nonsense now.

Nobody get too excited – just because Andy Burnham has reopened a debate that upside-down world said couldn’t be reopened, it doesn’t mean the UK is on the brink of coming to its senses. I have no idea what’s going to happen; all I can say for certain is that times have changed more than I realised. The pro-Brexit crew have updated their arguments. They no longer say leaving the…

Politics