Sometimes clichés and hyperbole are inescapable. Britain’s decision to leave the European Union really is momentous; it really will reshape Europe’s political landscape; things really will never be quite the same again.
The implications of this entirely avoidable decision look uniformly bad, and not just for the U.K. itself—in the unlikely event that it continues to exist.
It’s worth pointing out that “Britain” didn’t really decide anything. In reality a bare majority, composed primarily of those outside of metropolitan, cosmopolitan London, and an increasingly independently minded Scotland, made the decision.
It seems a visceral, barely coherent dislike of elites, Southerners, the City and—most of all—those dreadful bureaucrats in Brussels played a bigger part in deciding the outcome of this vote than any objective debate about the future of Britain, much less Europe.
Add immigration, deindustrialization, alienation, loss of identity, wrenching structural change, and—yes—apparent incompetence at the heart of the European project, and it’s not hard to see why so many became so disenchanted.
