A serious country would face the Brexit disaster: the silly and scared UK can't do it

Lowdown interview with Chris Grey This week, as every week, Brexit enfeebled the UK. It was not a one-off disaster, like a fatal heart attack. Rather Brexit is showing itself to be a debilitating disease that never grants us a moment’s peace. In the past few days The post-Brexit trade talks between the UK and Canada collapsed. Despite all the promises of global Britain crossing the clear blue oceans and cutting deals with India, the US, Canada and China, we remain isolated. After years of being too scared to actually take control of the UK’s borders, the government promised checks on imported food from the EU. The effect, according to the food industry, will be to raise prices and produce shortages. (Romantics searching for flowers for Valentine’s Day may well have their work cut out, despairing florists are already warning.) Brexit took away the right of Brits to live and work where we pleased in the EU. For a while in 2023 it looked as if France would allow British expats to stay for longer than 90 days at a stretch. But the French courts blocked that concession to second home owners in the Dordogne. Meanwhile the Brexit inspired border in the Irish Sea between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK continued to enrage Ulster Unionists, who in their hearts must now know that English Tories have played them for fools. Finally, the Guardian reported that the EU's plans to increase bulk medicine procurement across the bloc risk creating shortages in Britain. That’s just in the past few days. And yet the politicians who promised the electorate that leaving the EU would turn us into a world leader are simply not held to account. You would have to be 35 or older to remember how the BBC used to deal with politicians who failed to deliver on their promises. In 2003 Tony Blair backed the US invasion of Iraq on the grounds that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. He didn’t. BBC journalists tore into the then Labour government. Its ministers had taken us to war on a false prospectus, they claimed. Lied, in short. And yet in a dereliction of journalistic duty the BBC has let the false prospectus of Brexit pass without the smallest attempt to remind its authors of their false promises. Here is Daniel Hannan, the Zelig of British nationalism. For more than two decades, he popped up at what felt like every right-wing meeting and rally, urging ever more Utopian fantasies on the luckless British public. In 2016, he promised the revival of depressed British cities, a Silicon Valley in the East End of London, and falling prices and booming wages for us all. Is he or any other Conservative or Faragist politician questioned to within an inch of his life by the BBC? Of course not. Continuous funding cuts and right-wing attacks have destroyed the corporation’s ability to provide a vital news service. It’s given up on democratic accountability. Writing from London is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Upgrade to paid I can make one argument in its defence. If a BBC presenter were in the room with me now, I am sure they would say that the Labour opposition is giving them nothing to report. It is staying silent for fear of alienating elderly voters. The Liberal Democrats shut up for the same reason. In its politicians and media, the UK is like the caricature Victorian family that puts on a show of respectability and says nothing about its dirty secrets. No one, however, can shut up Professor Chris Grey, and our culture is the better for it. His Brexit & Beyond blog is the best source of information on our national malaise, and I was delighted to have him on podcast. I will write a longer piece, which will bounce off our conversation about the purity spiral on the right Brexit set off. With a bit of luck that should be up tomorrow or on Wednesday. I am also working of a read on the lessons from the 1920s for the 2020s. For the time being please listen to the podcast and sign up as a subscriber if you can. Please consider taking out a paying subscription if you can afford to. You will have access to all articles, archives and podcast, and you will allow me to carry on writing! Best wishes, Nick Paying subsribers have hundreds of features to read. Recent examples include Elon Musk and the west’s fascist fifth column NICK COHEN · SEPTEMBER 9, 2023 Elon Musk and the west’s fascist fifth column The liberal despair of Rafael Behr NICK COHEN · MAY 7, 2023 The liberal despair of Rafael Behr A “clenching of the soul,” David Grossman calls it. The Israeli novelist’s description of the foreboding that subsumes you as your life darkens should echo with anyone who has been mentally assaulted and battered. Strength vanishes. The body aches. 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