Make Britain great again, says a Remainer/Rejoiner

My nostalgia trip contnues with today's Graun and beloved Rafael Behr:

Without a reckoning about the epic strategic error of leaving the EU, there is no serious debate about the country’s future place in the world 

After summarising recent Great Events including military adventures in Iran, Behr urges a new role for Britain:

Britain can choose to be a partner in that project or accept a role as adjunct. National power could be boosted in an alliance of neighbours with broadly aligned global interests. Or it can be circumscribed by the Brexit cult of sovereignty that sees regulatory harmonisation with Europe as colonisation but welcomes subordination to US tech giants and industrial lobbies, which it calls free trade....British politics is not grappling with this predicament, which requires an honest audit of exorbitant costs and negligible benefits of life outside the EU... 

The electoral advantage in shutting down hard questions about Britain’s place in the world postponed the search for answers and confined it to the barren field of Brexit-believing policy options. Having failed to situate national problems in their proper global context, Labour ended up splashing around in the shallow end of political debate. That is the comfort zone of demagogues who blame the country’s ills on immigrants and benefits claimants. 

 Labour has had to reintroduce ambiguity about Rejoin, of course. Burnham is standing in a constituency that voted for Reform in reent local elections. He was a Rejoiner until last week. Back to Behr:

Farage, the ideological godfather of Brexit, doesn’t dare boast of it as an accomplishment. His model of future Britain is as a satrapy in a Maga-led US empire 

Behr thinks he can appeal to British expansionists better than Reform [I thought  British power was a fantasy only entertainde by nasty right-wingers?]

There is a reason why “take back control” was such an effective slogan in the referendum. It spoke to feelings of anxiety and lack of agency in a world of disorienting change.

Those feelings haven’t gone away. They are more severe because Britain’s capacity to influence global events was diminished, not boosted, by leaving the EU. This is the argument at its core. I suspect a lot of people are open to persuasion, if not persuaded already: the road to control leads back to Europe.

As misunderstandings go, this has got to be a good one. Taking back control was not about immigration or the democratic deficit in the EC, it was about some James Bond fantasy of Britain playing a world role again!