Cultural implications of Brexit re-run to reassure the npb*

R Behr is on the right lines with this, although upside down. If we invert it, his account tells us a lot about new petite bourgeois politics and distancing

Brexit is a machine to generate perpetual grievance. It's doing its job perfectly

The story of plucky Britain standing up to bullying Brussels spares leavers the discomfort of admitting they voted for a con

Euroscepticism is a machine for generating perpetual grievance.

It does indeed have some mileage still as a way of separating out knowledgeable sophisticated petite bourgeois journalists from the still-hated unspeakable plebs and toffs who voted for Brexit. Infuriatingly, Operation(s) Fear might not have actually happened (but see his explanation below), but there is still some superiority to demonstrate

First some fantasy politics to cover his own refusal to analyse how the EC actually works:

The UK still needs things from Brussels, but it has lost the leverage it had from a seat at the EU summit table. This makes it harder for Boris Johnson to play the old double game of public belligerence and private compromise.

Then the explanation for the relative calm. Some of this might be right, I should say

Were it not for the pandemic, loose ends and lost jobs would be making more headlines. Whether they would also be changing public opinion is a different question. Some enthusiasm is surely dropping into the chasm between Brexit as liberation theology and its real-world incarnation as rotting fish undelivered to a Calais market. But British political culture contains deep reserves of stoical resignation to adversity (especially other people’s adversity). There is no simple road back, no better deal on the table, [so no real political point in this article] and it is easy for ministers to spin the pain mandated by their deal as aggression by vengeful Europeans [pretty obvious I would have thought after the Article 16 fiasco] ....plucky Britain standing up to bullying Brussels. It is the story the Eurosceptics used to tell when the UK was an EU member, but more potent because the 27-against-one dynamic that was a paranoid myth has become a fact. Over time, that dynamic will make it ever harder for the opposition to express a pro-European position without inviting the charge of siding with an enemy....

El Graihbn seems to have lost its electoral constituency. That seems to leave only cultural politics then, endless skirmishing about social superiority to claim privilege. Then some Freudian bits where Behr reveals a lot about his own stance while criticising us

They long ago swapped economic argument for culture war bluster....For the true believers, a good Brexit is one that keeps the grievance alive; that makes foreigners the scapegoat for bad government; that continues to indulge the twin national myths of victimhood and heroic defiance. Measured for that purpose, Johnson’s pointless Brexit is perfect.

As this blog among others shows, economic arguments, based on, among others, the myth that the EU subsidised UK policy and was entirely benevolent and growth-led, rapidly gave way to some vague cultural claims of superiority thinly covering the usual class hatreds. Culture war bluster indeed. Brexit was a pretext for rehearsing all those again, bursting out from under liberal coatings in the Guardian and the BBC -- and evidently still there. Their spokespersons are desperately engaged in trying to save face while retaining those old cultural values. They must reassert them. They need constantly renewed targets. Trump has gone. The old issues have to be revived until new ones solidify, Brexit was so good at unifying so many specifics in ways that other petty bourgeois moral panics --gender wars, statue removals -- will find difficult to emulate.