Enveloped in Westminster silence it may be, but every day and in every way Brexit is getting more real. For so long, this was an argument made through the medium of abstract nouns: “freedom”, “sovereignty”, “control”. But now reality is intruding. This week came word that Brexit added almost £6bn to Britons’ food bills over a two-year period, and that it was the households with least that were affected most. There’s a reason politicians refer to “bread-and-butter issues”: because there is nothing abstract about food and what it costs.
Looking back, it was always a tell that leave campaigners sought to avoid the realm of the concrete, preferring to stick with intangible talk of “independence” or a regained mastery of our national destiny. They knew reality was a hostile environment for the Brexit project, one that would expose its folly. Remainers tried to resist, hoping not to fight on the battlefield of dreams but on the terrain of facts and figures, yet it never worked. It just made them sound boring, casting them as spoilsport bean-counters and, besides, all their numbers were themselves abstractions – projections of a hypothetical future. The forecasts of gloom could be, and were, swatted aside as “project fear”.
