I live in the UK, so I feel pretty confident answering that Guardian subhead: the country hasn’t changed enough.

The facts were clear back in 2016 and are still clear now:

1. Frictionless trade with the EU was an incredible benefit
2. Migrants are overall contributors to the economy and tax-funded services

People have woken up a little bit when it comes to the benefits of free movement of goods, but enough of them still have their heads in the sand when it comes to free movement of people.

I say “enough of them”, because I’m not sure if it’s an actual majority of people who have these views. The primitive electoral system here allows for relatively easy manipulation, meaning that public views are often warped rather than expressed through general elections. The largely compliant and surprisingly incompetent media class never fully interrogates politicians’ claims, preferring instead to play the role of fabulists for the rich and powerful. People who can see through this thin and unrigorous mainstream coverage often end up drawn into social media misinformation bubbles, which just amplify their worst fears.

The attitudes of some of the people profiled in this article are telling, especially the guy who has absorbed a £70,000 loss to his fishing business. While it can’t have been fun, he inadvertently also revealed that he wasn’t doing that badly to begin with, when he voted for Brexit. For most people, a £70,000 hit would be ruinous. So he was already relatively wealthy and wasn’t struggling or held back by the EU, in fact his business prospered more because of it. He just swallowed a fable about the riches that would come his way from deregulation. He voted out of greed. It’s hard to sympathise with him when his vote has had far worse consequences for the younger, poorer people who were not already doing relatively well under the status quo. These effects aren’t yet clear in economic data, and this article only features people who were of voting age at the time of Brexit, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a generational or even multi generational setback unfolding.

And now that Brexit is playing out in exactly the way that anyone with a fondness for reality could have predicted back in 2016, the charlatan line has shifted to: the “establishment” resisted Brexit and never gave it a chance to succeed.

Underpinning that, as always, is the widely held belief that “foreigners” are a corrosive cultural and economic force. It’s the same misdirection that led to Brexit: accurately point to people’s sufferings and call out their economy for being exploitative, but point to fake causes (migrants, mainly), thus motivating them to vote in the interests of their actual oppressors. As long as enough people fall for this, as long as seeing someone with a different skin tone or hearing an unfamiliar accent is so triggering for them, and the public in general doesn’t push for electoral reform, I can’t see anything improving fundamentally.

Sheeple gotta sheeple :-) "‘Absolute nightmare, shambles, and still is to this day,’ says Tony Rutherford a decade after he voted leave to save the British fishing industry.”