The New Yorker:

Like grief, Brexit comes in waves. Since Britain decided, two summers ago, to leave the European Union, there have been weeks—occasionally entire months—when it has been possible not to think about it, or to imagine that the whole business is moving along somewhere. But then something shifts, the vertigo returns, and people start tearing their hair out all over again. This June is one of those times. The U.K.’s formal negotiations to leave the E.U. began almost exactly a year ago and are heading for one of their periodic showdowns, at a European Council meeting at the end of the month. The deeply complicated talks are supposed to be basically finished by October, and right now it’s hard to see how that is possible. At the same time, Theresa May’s fragile Conservative government is trying to steer its flagship Brexit legislation through the Houses of Parliament, beset on all sides by rebels, dreamers, and Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party.

The elements of the Brexit process that now trigger major discord are so technical and abstruse that only a handful of people really understand them. In recent weeks, the national debate has centered on apparently schismatic differences over whether Britain and the European Union should maintain “the” customs union, “a” customs union, a customs “partnership,” or (the government’s favored euphemism) a customs “arrangement.” But these arguments almost always flow back to the same place—whether you think Brexit is a good idea at all. And on that question the country remains about as divided as it was when it voted, by fifty-two to forty-eight per cent, to leave the E.U. “People just haven’t budged,” a senior government official told me the other day. “There is a third of people who really want to leave, a third that desperately want us to stay, and . . . of the people in the middle, a lot of them are just sick of this, and really tired, but are still generally associated with whichever way they voted.”

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