Image: Nicola Sturgeon and Alex Salmond of the SNP during the 2015 General Election campaign. Credit: Andrew Milligan/PA Images, all rights reserved
The Tories continue their thirty-year civil war on Europe, while Corbyn’s Labour continue to uphold constructive ambiguity informed by their leader’s long held Euroscepticism. The Lib Dems struggle for any relevance after the Cameron coalition. This present impasse has shown the limitations of British democracy and a deep-seated malaise about the meaning of Britain, with Brexit debates reduced to Westminster parlour games shaped by the most obsessional opinions, and a Tory Party in the grip of a reactionary, insular, backward looking English nationalism, which has the potential not only to destroy the Tories but take all of us over the cliff into the abyss.
The historic moment is, however, somewhat anticlimactic, as Fintan O’Toole has suggested. Much of the script has been written by a fantasy version of history. Brexit, he writes, is “full, not just of nostalgia, but of pseudo-history. It is an old curiosity shop of fake antiques.”
