Taking everything together, then, this is a dismally instructive story, enfolding generalized myths about the second world war and specific myths about champagne bottles, metrication, and the supposed outlawing of imperial units, stirred in with the faux-victimhood of martyrdom. The report also identifies some areas where the UK has “flirted” with not just divergence but regression, including air pollution policy, and areas like chemicals and pesticides where the UK has been slower and less stringent in regulatory change than the EU.

I still have a vivid memory of seeing a TV vox pop conducted before, or possibly shortly after, the referendum with a voter in, I think, South Yorkshire. Initial media and industry reports are confusing, so watch out for clarification in the coming days. Again this issue was discussed in more detail in a previous post, in February 2022, when the policy was still being developed. This re-balancing was supposed to mean that, whilst financial services would benefit from Brexit by being freed from EU bureaucracy, other sectors would benefit even more. That Churchill did so was confirmed by a 2018 BBC interview with Hubert de Billy, the head of the Pol Roger company that supplied it.The most general one is that the Brexit dishonesty that I discussed in last week’s post isn’t negated, but exacerbated, if it is replicated by anti-Brexiters. That problem is compounded by the often complex issue of whether and to what extent, within particular areas, UK policy had actually been a result of its EU membership in the first place. It is an issue which is about come to the fore again when the UK finally begins to implement full import controls on goods coming from the EU at the end of this month (unless there is a sixth delay in doing so). We await Maddox’s fulminations on behalf of the “little ordinary people” and “decent hard-working folk” being ‘dumped on’ by the EUSS. Meanwhile, Simon Berry, Chairman of Berry Bros and Rudd wine importers, a keen Brexiter who has campaigned for the re-introduction of champagne pints, mentions that the Conservative politician and diplomat Duff Cooper was bemoaning its demise as early as the First World War, and Berry’s own campaign started in the 1970s.

It’s this, along with the problem of disentangling what is and isn’t a Brexit effect, which makes evaluating it so difficult. Chris Grey’s rigorous analysis of how Brexit unfolded should be mandatory reading for anyone who cares about politics.This week’s domestic news has been dominated by the Horizon Post Office scandal, following the screening of the ITV drama Mr Bates vs the Post Office.

And, just as Vennells is depicted as a hypocrite because of her religious beliefs, so they were depicted as having betrayed community trust. But it does not follow that the practice was widespread, and in that interview (which also features Brexit dunderhead ‘Sir’ Tim Martin getting all moist about Churchill), de Billy also explains that this bottle size was already dying out from the 1940s. For one thing, there is a kind of febrile desperation in the air in Britain today, so that, faced with a choice between the uninspiringly cautious Keir Starmer and some novel, perhaps charismatic, Tory candidate, the electorate might just opt for the latter. At stake, here, is the bigger battle of the ‘ Five Families’ or ‘Brexitists’ to slough off the last, moth-eaten, remnants of ‘traditional’ Conservatism.It’s of note that even some of those who reacted to that announcement with enthusiasm were confused about what was at stake, with one market trader appearing to think it was to do with the use of decimal currency. Yesterday’s rebuke to the government from the UK Statistics Authority for its misleading use of asylum figures is just the latest example, along with the now almost routine ‘context additions’ (aka factual discredits) placed on posts on X from Sunak, or other government ministers, or government departments, or the Conservative Party. According to the3million, the main campaign group for EU citizens living in the UK, at least 140,000 people are in Maria’s situation of having Certificates of Application, but awaiting the outcome. The latest trade figures show that the percentage of UK trade done with the EU is now higher than before the referendum, at about 53.

For all these reasons, Alexandra Bulat, another campaigner in this area, and who is now the first British-Romanian Labour County Councillor, argued in February 2018 that public perception that Citizens’ rights had effectively been dealt with during phase one was mistaken. However (although, really, it is another aspect of the same basic issue) the situation of post-Brexit Britain is worse still than that of largely maintaining alignment with single market standards whilst not reaping the benefits of single market membership. Some politicians, too, including Green MP Caroline Lucas, have taken an active interest in it, just as a few did in the Post Office case.Now, he is quite ludicrously* castigating Keir Starmer for having been Director of Public Prosecutions when the postmasters were being prosecuted and, of course, he made much of his ‘victimization’ when de-banked by Coutts. But it also has a pragmatic and political aspect, and one which should be as important to those who want to ‘make the best of Brexit’ as to those who want to reverse Brexit altogether. Just as I’ve argued in the past that it is useful to imagine how the UK would have regarded another country had it been leaving the EU, so is it instructive to think about how the UK looks from abroad. There are some clear and direct parallels between this scandal and the Post Office, most obviously in the role of technology, where the flaws in the Horizon system can be compared with those in the EUSS View and Prove system. The issue of the failed promises of Brexiters is also central to one of this week’s biggest news stories, the announcement of major job losses at the Tata steel plant in Port Talbot.