The bigger picture

I feel this puts the situation the UK finds itself in so well, what @chrisgreybrexit is the best Brexit blogger there is:

As ever, it is important to recall the bigger picture to avoid getting entirely lost in the swirl of events. Within that, what remains the irreducible core of the crisis is the fact that voting to leave the EU was not a vote for any particular way of doing so – a result of the deliberate strategy of the Vote Leave Campaign as devised by one Dominic Cummings.

It is this which continues to make our politics impossible because it means that the concept of ‘delivering Brexit’ is as meaningless as the accusation of ‘betraying Brexit’. All versions of Brexit – from the soft Brexit that some expected, to May’s hard Brexit deal that was rejected by MPs, to the no-deal Brexit that is now threatened - can all equally well be regarded as delivering it or as betraying it.

What has made things doubly impossible is the insistence that there is an inviolable democratic principle at stake because of the Referendum vote. This automatically sets up a failure of democracy given that any particular form of honouring the vote also betrays it. Moreover, since the form of delivery can only be decided by the democratically elected parliament, democracy has been weaponised against itself.

None of this is a function of there being a ‘remainer parliament’. Exactly the same dynamic would be present if every MP had been a lifelong Brexiter, because they would still have to decide on a form of Brexit which by definition could only be one of those that Brexit could take and therefore at odds with what at least some who voted for Brexit in the referendum had expected.

Almost everything we have lived through over the last three years flows from this, and it’s worth re-stating it partly because it means that what is happening now is not just to do with particular politicians or decisions but is more deeply rooted. It explains, for example, the surreal spectacle this week of Brexiter Tory MPs who voted repeatedly to block May’s deal denouncing their rebel colleagues, many of whom had voted for it.

More importantly, it matters because until the basic, irreconcilable conundrum it reveals is faced up to there is no hope of resolving the deepening national crisis. Unfortunately, there is little sign that this will happen because, if this analysis is right, a General Election will not in and of itself address the problem.

https://chrisgreybrexitblog.blogspot.com/2019/09/johnson-bulldozes-britain-deeper-into.html