A YouGov poll now puts Remain on 51%. Pretty much within the margin of error. There is no guarantee Remain would win a second referendum, especially with Leave starting from a far healthier position than it did in 2015 when, if memory serves, it was somewhere around 36%.
Were there to be a re-run of the referendum, it would likely play out in exactly the same way. Remain would have all the economic arguments on its side but the face of Remain would still be the same old faces, issuing the same threats and looking down their noses at the oiks. They haven't learned anything and they never will. It all comes down to whoever the electorate despises the least.
This is where a certain amount of self awareness is a crucial weapon. Most leavers I speak to who've interrogated the subject in any depth will freely admit that Nigel Farage is "a bit of a nob", and it can't have escaped the attention of any upright walking person that Boris Johnson is at best a shambles of a man. The leave vote has never been an endorsement of them or their politics. Rather they are figureheads who seem to bring out all the worst traits in the metro left remain camp. A form of Trumpian judo.
That the remain vote is twitching into the lead, though, is neither here nor there. Unless or until there is a fresh vote, the 2016 referendum sands as the only official count and it doesn't look to have shifted. the country is still sharply divided and with around half the country wanting to leave, EU membership just isn't sustainable. It doesn't have enough popular consent.
Of course, remainers would equally say that Brexit also lacks that clear mandate, especially when it is such an open ended question upon which there is no agreement. At least the status quo (what's left of it) sustains a relatively functioning economy and a political settlement that is appalling but arguably tolerable.
But then I would argue that it is no longer tolerable. The Westminster bubble has not yet been popped and its decisions simply do not represent or reflect public sentiment. The decision waved through parliament (without a national debate or serious parliamentary scrutiny) to commit in law to a zero carbon target is precisely the sort of narcissistic and dangerous behaviour that brought us to this point in the first place.
As it happens, I am a climate sceptic. I don't think the science is sufficiently well developed and the "project fear" scare stories are entirely agenda driven. It gives politicians ample excuse to close down human liberties and tax us into the stone age. But you don't have to be a climate sceptic to see that government without informed consent is no basis for a modern democracy. One wonders if we would be leaving the EU had there ever been a referendum on Lisbon or EU enlargement or freedom of movement.
The problem being that our political apparatus is susceptible to any passing virtue signalling fad from the supposed gender pay gap through to climate change. It is not without consequence. It leads to politicians making life more expensive and less equitable, while a value system is imposed on the public that is alien to their own. A moral dictatorship. One that is gradually defining any speech it doesn't like as hate speech and anything remotely conservative as "far right". If they cannot use the domestic political apparatus to push through their agenda then they'll go around it by way of the EU.
This has a corrosive and cumulative effect. Being that it is essential a left wing/progressive agenda, there is no limit to the depravity in attacking all societal norms, to the point where we're putting serial rapists in women's prisons because they self identify as female, and undermining women's sports by allowing self-castrated men to compete. Speaking out against this is, of course, a form of bigotry that can lead a person to be deplatformed, unpersoned or even fired. The same can be said for climate sceptics or anyone who questions the left wing orthodoxy.
This is partly why I don't care if the climate bedwetters are right. If the only way for humanity to survive is to surrender its freedoms to an all powerful state that controls what you say and think, then it's time to call time on humanity. Extinction is preferable to slavery.
Left to its own devices, our establishment would virtue signal its way to bankruptcy as it commits us to unworkable renewable energy and carbon capture storage, driving up energy costs and driving polluters to China while the economy contracts under the weight of green taxes. We are then in no position to exert soft power or economic pressure. Put simply, we cannot afford the status quo.
Moreover, the prevailing orthodoxy does not believe in immigration control, does not believe in borders and would reduce us all to transient nomads grazing from the land but with no spiritual connection to it nor authority over it. It is a sterile ideology contrary to human nature. Anti-human in fact.
It comes as no surprise that the left across the west want us to declare a "climate emergency" but it's the perfect pretext for their economic and social agendas. Much like a tinpot dictator declaring "temporary" martial law and suspending elections for "national security reasons". But that's all ok if we're saving the planet, right?
This weapons grade institutional virtue signalling is the very essence of Western decadence we cannot leave unchecked. This is, in part, why Brexit has become a culture war where leaving the EU is only a secondary objective. The primary now being to ensure the left loses and loses big. For the headbangers even a WTO Brexit is not hard enough.
As I've remarked before, Britain is in a state of civil war. It has not yet come to a shooting war, and I pray that it won't, but like all civil wars, the economy takes a back seat until there is a final political resolution and we cannot progress until there is an outright victor. This is a fight to the death.
There are those among the metro left who now indulge in a from of nostalgia for the pre-Brexit days. They hark back to 2012, the year of the Olympics (peak narcissism), where progressives bought into the self-woven mythology that Britain was a broadly progressive country sharing in the values imposed on them by their rulers and broadcast by the state media. A Utopian bubble of self-regard where reality never intrudes. One in which Ed Miliband is the voice of tempered reason.
In 2016, though, the oiks found a voice and the fightback started. It was a rude awakening for the liberal progressive establishment who never imagined for a moment that the voiceless majority thought differently to them. Ever since they have gone into overdrive to put the genie pack in the bottle. But it hasn't worked.
Instead of accepting the result of the referendum and worked toward a constructive outcome they have mobilised every arm of the establishment to try and prevent it and waged a legal jihad on Brexit and Brexiters. Both sides have fought each other to a standstill, and with parliament having defeated Theresa May and the withdrawal agreement, we are now coasting idly toward a Boris Johnson premiership and a no deal Brexit.
Of course, it takes two to tango. The Ultras weren't satisfied with their referendum win. They had to make it a game of double or quits in pushing for the suicidal WTO option. Anyone who would have settled for a managed departure was pushed into the remain camp. The remainers, though, lacking self-awareness or any finesse, have bungled it.
The consequence of this is a Brexit we will never fully recover from for reasons I have outlined elsewhere. It's easy to blame Rees-Mogg and the the ERG, but the root of this lies with the narcissism of the progressive left. Brexit is far from unique. America is undergoing a political reckoning, as is the UK and France. This will spread.
What makes Brexit unique is that it has far more dangerous consequences than political revolutions elsewhere in the West. Successive governments have tied us to ever closer union and ever more political and economic integration, and in their hubris believed it would be irreversible. They tied up all of our external relations into a single treaty framework. A single point of failure ensuring that Brexit was so costly that electorates wouldn't dare vote to leave. It almost worked but they underestimated precisely how repellent they were.
The consequence of this is that Britain's political reckoning will be far more costly than it ever needed to be, and with the consequences being so damaging, our politics could be in a state of flux for decades to come. Political dysfunction may well be the new normal for this next chapter of Britain.
Ultimately, the UK as we know it is at the end of the line. Our outmoded way of doing politics has outstayed its welcome and outlived its usefulness. As much as it is no longer capable of providing answers to the challenges we face in the new century, it is the cause of much of our problems. Brexit is really just the moment the camel's back snapped. The EU has successfully masked the hollowing out of British politics but now we've pulled back the curtain. There is nothing left to salvage.
What we see is an entitled and privileged ruling class, whose behaviours are reinforced by our ancient political institutions, which were designed around a system of feudalism. It has never been a democracy and it has no intention of becoming one. We can use the vote to limited effect to select our dictators but we the people are not in control. We are spectators while politicians from either wing of the establishment impose their agenda upon us. this applies as much to the ERG with their "fwee twade" delusions as it does the climate bedwetters and welfare patriarchs of the left.
What comes next is really up to us. The fallout from a no deal Brexit should provide fertile ground for new ideas and new political movements. That, ultimately, is the Brexit dividend. Brexit will only have failed is we allow what comes next to be rebuilt in the image of what came before. If Britain is ever to be a democracy then this is the reckoning we must have. There can be no economic or social revival until this war is resolved.
Economic prosperity depends almost entirely on political stability. The prosperity we have enjoyed was always time limited. As our politics has decayed, we see more and more signs that the essentials are breaking down. Legal aid has all but collapsed making a fair trial (a central tenet of any enlightened culture) an impossibility. Grenfell Tower told its own story, not just in terms of the fire itself, but also the fraud and theft in its wake. These are the signs of a society in terminal decline. Brexit may not be the solution, but it does at least start the ball rolling on a process of renewal. Whether it succeeds or fails is really down to us. We cannot look to our rulers to save us.
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