The New Yorker says Britain’s split with the European Union “catalysed the worst tendencies in British politics” in a damning report out this week.
Sam Knight’s editorial, titled ‘What Have Fourteen Years of Conservative Rule Done to Britain?’, points to a decline in living standards and a country that is exhausted by constant drama in a tale that will feel familiar to many people living here.
It lays bare how Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union (EU) “catalysed some of the worst tendencies in British politics”, namely its :superficiality, nostalgia, and love of game play”.
And it says under successive Tory PMs the country has “suffered grievously” from “years of loss and waste” brought about by successive prime ministers from the same elite schools.
One such candidate was David Cameron, who set into motion the UK’s exit from the EU after pledging to commit to a referendum during the 2015 general election.
His move to settle, once and for all, what Knight dubs a long-lasting “internal Tory argument about Britain’s place in an integrating EU” turned “what was an abstruse obsession on the right wing of British politics into a much simpler, terrifyingly binary choice for the population on how they felt their life was going.”
And the fallout from the debate has, as always, been left to the British public to mop up, who have been left with stickier inflation, lower economic growth, a burdensome regulatory environment and fewer freedoms as a result.
Related: ‘Nationalise them now’: Sewage spills from storm overflows up 54% in 2023