The British have done a first-class job of memory-holing the issue that consumed their politics in recent years: Britain’s relationship with the European Union. Who would have guessed from recent news that Keir Starmer made his political career leading the campaign against Brexit? Or that the Conservative Party expected its referendum triumph to lay the foundations of a long period of hegemony?
There are good reasons for this. Regular people got bored with the European question. (Boris Johnson’s slogan in his 2019 election triumph was an exasperated “get Brexit done.”) And even the intended beneficiaries of the divorce ended up losing out: The British economy remains stagnant, and the British state is no more capable of controlling immigration than it was in 2015.