On Brexit, will no one in the major parties admit that Britain has blundered?

theguardian.com:

‘H alf a league, half a league, / Half a league onward. / All in the valley of Death, / Rode the six hundred.” Why does Tennyson’s great poem come to mind as the local garage waits for a spare part to be delivered from Turin to fix a problem with my Fiat?

In pre-Brexit days, thanks to Margaret Thatcher’s great achievement in integrating the British economy into the European single market, spare parts for cars, dishwashers – you name it – could be delivered almost overnight thanks to the sophistication of the EU supply chain.

No more! There is supply-chain chaos all over the land, although our prime minister recently gave the game away about the hole in his absurd championing of Brexit by admitting that Northern Ireland, as a member of the UK and the European single market, enjoys the best of both worlds.

In the case of my Fiat, Proietti Brothers of Islington have had to wait three weeks: a relatively small, personal anecdote of the frustrations of Brexit. So why did a famous verse I learned at school come to mind? I’ll tell you why: because the worst government of most people’s lifetimes is ploughing on, pretending that it can make a success of a manifest disaster. And the Labour opposition refuses to challenge it on the biggest self-inflicted crisis of our time, tamely ruling out the obvious need to rejoin the single market and restore freedom of movement to businesses and citizens.

Now, although the economy is in a bad way, and affected by the consequences of Brexit at almost every turn – a dramatic rise in import prices is a direct consequence of Brexit, and explains why our inflation rate is stubbornly higher than that of our European neighbours – I do not for one moment wish to overdo the valley of death analogy.