On the down side it has distracted from urgent reforms  and general business the EU needs to get on with - Climate change, Euro reform, reducing inequality etc. But is there any evidence the EU would have pursued these issues any more urgently in the absence of Brexit? Is it coincidental that there seems to have been a renewed push on signing more trade deals recently?

Index of Frank's Diaries

Yes, there will be many sighs of relief, but we will also have to deal with that (possibly ~40%) segment who believe they were cheated of their manifest destiny to make a free (and whiter) britain.

Pandora's box has been torn open. Racism and racist violence is increasing, nazis openly march, a member of Parliament was shot dead on the streets. I honestly thought we'd learned, I honestly thought that unrepentant racists had been reduced to an ineducable rump of malcontents who would die off.

But the rise of ukip, the lionizing of Nigel Farage and his bar stool dog whistling, followed by the media courting of the far more overt Tommy Robinson has shown how complacent I was. Brexit validated these people, people emboldened to wear t-shirts saying "Yes, we won. Now send them home". And the "them" here wasn't about nice white germans or nordic blonds, it was all about coloured people, just like always.

These people feel they are the majority view, released after decades of being held back by an elitist few in the media with their "political correctness". They won't be going back in their box anytime soon and we'll have to live alongside them for many decades to come.

I once said here that the UK had made every mistake it was possible to make about rce relations, but that we had finally learned and come to terms with them. Well, we made a new mistake and now we're gonna have to re-learn every lesson again, from the beginning.

We will not have gotten away with brexit. It has wrecked Britain, economically and socially.

keep to the Fen Causeway