I think often of an interview with Jerry Garcia that I read in 1987, when the Grateful Dead had rebounded and gone back out on tour following Garcia’s brush with death: A combination of diabetes and heroin addiction had landed him in a coma, and for a while it wasn’t clear if he would ever be able to play guitar again. Anyway, the interviewer asked him directly about his addiction, and he said (approximately; I don’t have the original text) “You come to drugs with your problems. And after a while the problems fade away, and it’s just you and the drugs.”
And similarly Brexit. Britain came to Brexit with lots of serious problems: housing shortage, inequality, underfunded health service, declining influence in the world and uncertainty about what global role it should or could aspire to. Brexit doesn’t solve these problems, but they’ve faded away. Now it’s just us and Brexit.
Common Infirmities 