Despite widespread Bregret, no Breturn expected soon
The Brits are too sporting for a redo. Maybe some of this fair play business might be transferred from Britain, which has too much, to the US, which does not.
To the naked eye, London seems as when I lived there in the 2000s. Londoners still mind the gap between the train and the platform, close the pubs early, serve sausages quite foul and occupy buildings, parks and "high streets" that are a joy to behold. But there is deep disquiet in the air, and it seems to stem from Brexit.
The malaise is severe enough to have created a sort-of political Halley's Comet: near-universal acceptance that the opposition will win the election that must be held by the end of the year. Sir Kier Starmer, the ex-prosecutor and head of the Labour Party, is generally accepted as the prime minister-in-waiting.
He does not strut about insufferably mainly because he's quite stolid. That was rather the point of him after Jeremy Corbyn, his terrorist-befriending predecessor who led Labour to disaster in the 2019 election. I bet Starmer is also humbled by his incredible good luck in following not only his own party's crank but also the Brexit-era Tories—the inept Theresa May, the clownish Boris Johnson, the fleeting Liz Truss (outlasted in office by a lettuce) and now Rishi Sunak, who presents as wide-eyed and boyish.
This near-certainty is strikingly different from the situation in United States, which will be going to the polls around the same time but where no one has a clue how things will go down.
I observe a similarity between the "cousins" on immigration, which is a massive kerfuffle in both countries. Perhaps that is no coincidence, because English is a factor that attracts at present. "You guys are also being invaded," one Brexit supporter told me, with what was clearly real concern.
In America, many indeed fear the government is unwilling or unable to police the southern border, and rightly or wrongly the Democrats' handling of it is pushing voters to the right (as I have written on these pages).
In Britain, the border really was wide-open to "foreigners" who were also citizens of the European Union, and it caused multitudes to support Brexit. Immigration from other countries, oddly enough, is actually up, by choice; but the obligation to let in everyone in Europe is gone. I'd wager this is by far the main reason why just over a third of Brits tell pollsters now that they would do it again. But therein lies the source of the disquiet: almost two-thirds are experiencing what one might call Bregret.
The “mistake” narrative stems from voters being bamboozled by the Leave campaign's nonsense about how billions would flow back to Britain if it bolted the EU. Instead, they paid a steep price—perhaps a tenth of Britain's potential GDP was shaved off by removing itself from the world's largest combined economy, of which London had been the financial capital.
That status was key to understanding why London in the early years of this century felt like the center of the universe.
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