And Brexit will be particularly cruel both on car making, reborn after its 1970s nadir, and the world’s second largest aerospace industry. The currency markets have bet all along that a deal between rational people will get done. But this is testing even their nerves.
Leading economic historian Niall Ferguson – who opposed Brexit at the time because of the mess he guessed it would make – told me last week that Brexit would get “only a paragraph in the history books”, forgotten in the big story of the EU’s collapse after the Italian debt implosion.
He could be right. But Brexiteers have been using prophecies of disaster in Europe to vindicate themselves from the start. They have not swayed Brussels or comforted British business.
The EU has put solidarity ahead of pragmatism, most of all on their Irish border where they have backed their member in Dublin over departing Britain.
The Brexiteers in Parliament of course hold the ultimate mandate of the popular referendum win. But it was a deeply flawed mandate, no guide to the complexity of the process so obvious now.
Remainers in Parliament could now sideline Mrs May on the floor of the Commons – if her party does not sack her first – to make an almost equally powerful case for a second referendum that might reverse Brexit. That would exchange economic hell for political hell. And none can tell which would be most lasting.
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