Prosperity has fed this climate of mass hysteria

As the country has split in half, MPS have wasted three years failing to tackle our long-term challenges

‘Your country appears politically to have gone stark, raving mad”, a senior foreign diplomatic said to me the other day. There may be many weighty and entirely honourable beliefs and principles at stake in our current obsession with Brexit, but sometimes it is hard to disagree.

One of the principal reasons for voting Remain was that the effort of leaving the European Union would become an energy-consuming black hole, sucking the oxygen out from almost everything else. So it has proved. Gainful, or even just competent, governance has all but ceased in the three years since Britain voted for Brexit. At a time of mounting long-term challenges on multiple fronts – from climate change to the rise of China, ageing demographics, and rapid technological change – there has on the centre-right been an almost complete hiatus in worthwhile initiatives and ideas.

With a now imminent leadership contest adding to the uncertainty over Brexit, a planned three-year spending review has been all but ditched. Decisions cannot be made when nobody knows what form Brexit will take, if any, or indeed what the new leader might want to do with the inherited chalice.

The degree to which the political debate and public psyche has been taken over by Brexit, with anger if anything intensifying on both sides of the divide rather than abating, is one of the most remarkable political developments of modern times. It is as if we have been gripped by an outbreak of positively medieval mass hysteria.

I’ve been scratching my head as to why this is so, and have concluded that the answer is the opposite of what the conventional narrative would have us believe. In this now quite widely-accepted explanation, Brexit has acted as a magnet for any number of simmering discontents that have been incubating for more than 20 years and were crystallised by the shock of the financial crisis.

This has never been an entirely plausible account of where we are; few Brexit voters are naive enough to think the European Union the root cause of all of Britain’s problems. Rewind 10 years to the catastrophe of the financial crisis; concern about very high levels of migration was admittedly already widespread, but Europe was on the whole not something that much troubled voters. The consuming subjects of political and public debate back then were egregious bankers, the collapse in the public finances, and the degree to which public spending would need to be curbed to bring spiralling national debt back under control. Austerity, not Europe, was the big dividing point in British politics.

That debate has not entirely gone away, but subsequent success in managing to reduce the deficit has rendered it less relevant. Figures this week put the deficit on track to be the lowest in 17 years, taking us back to the days before the Blair/brown Government went on its spending binge.

We have also seen a remarkable recovery in the economy. Now in its ninth consecutive year of growth, an astonishing 3.5million jobs have been added in the 10 years since the banking bust. According to survey evidence from Eurobarometer, the proportion of Britons who say they are “fairly satisfied” or “very satisfied” with their life has been on a strongly rising trend since the turn of the century and at 93 per cent is now at its highest level by far since comparable surveys began nearly 50 years ago. Overwhelmingly pro-brexit retired home owners are among the most satisfied of the lot.

Brexit does not, then, seem to be the scream of despair it is often depicted as. Rather, today’s deepening Brexit divide may be a symptom of relative prosperity. Calm in the economy has allowed the luxury of theological and political schism, bringing to the surface high levels of dissatisfaction with a political establishment that seems to have no answers to the gathering sense of public rage.

In the ensuing political vacuum, one-time obsession with the deficit has been replaced by argument over the European customs union. Systems for international trade, something few even understood let alone were interested in 10 years ago, are frankly of really only quite marginal importance to the economy. It would take really quite dramatic shifts in trade to make a significant difference to output and growth, and yet control of trade policy is where conflict over Brexit is at its most pronounced.

In the meantime, one-time fiscal hawks have been transformed by the relative improvement in the public finances into raging spendthrifts. Dominic Raab proposes to slash the basic rate of income tax by 5p in the pound; Jacob Rees-mogg proposes to pay for social care from general taxation. These are not new ideas, equal to the challenges of the age, but vote-buying desperation. When asked how these giveaways are to be funded, no answer is forthcoming.

One day we’ll look back on this time and conclude that someone must have put something in the water. For the moment, we remain firmly locked in collective psychosis.