A sprat to catch a mackerel

As we know, the motivation behind a powerful and ruthless section of laissez-faire global capital's support for Brexit was to destabilise the whole European project for its own advantage. Now Europe is uniting against it, Brexit has become merely an afterthought, an exercise in arbitrary self-harm on the part of an increasingly unimportant and backward looking medium sized country on the eastern fringes of the Atlantic. In a globalised, interdependent world the sovereignty argument was only ever a ploy to engage romantic adolescents and insular nationalists deliberately blind to the increasing powerlessness of the traditional nation state in the face of the new economic realities.
When the June 2016 referendum became the most effective means of protest on the part of those left behind and impoverished by the neo-liberal consensus, the purveyors of  deregulatory snake oil were astonished at their own good fortune. Yet the struggling, the 'left behind' - shut out from the prosperity of the south-east and starved - by an extraordinary conspiracy of silence about the benefits to poorer regions of EU membership  - of the information necessary to make an informed decision, were always meant to pay the price...