The gap between reckless Brexit promises and reality will soon be too big to ignore | John Harris

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

61% : Whatever happens, the resentments Brexit causes are likely to benefit some dark political forces, but without voices trying to direct people's exasperation towards something positive, that problem will be even worse.
56% : Brexit was also an expression of a dire breakdown in public trust, which had been under way for several years, furthered by the effects on politics of the internet, intensified by the MPs' expenses scandal, and traceable in large part to the war in Iraq.
55% : Among some of the people we once termed remainers, there seems to be a belief that the chaos Brexit causes will sooner or later have beneficial political effects.
50% : In that context, their eventual championing of Brexit represented something grim: people using a collapse in trust they themselves had contributed to, to build support for a course of action that risked squashing trust yet further.
49% : If that collective belief has so far shown no obvious signs of fading (indeed, it lives on in the implied links Johnson draws between Brexit and "levelling up")
46% : (It is telling that in July 2016, Davis used the publication of the Chilcot report about Iraq to accuse Tony Blair of being a liar - and then, three months later, brazenly told the House of Commons that if leaving the EU went to plan: "There will be no downside to Brexit at all, only a considerable upside.")
46% : So people in the political mainstream - by which I chiefly mean Labour MPs - need to start loudly talking about Brexit, the promises of the people who led the campaign for it, and what life outside Europe is doing to us.
33% : In Scotland, the results of Brexit sit at the heart of Nicola Sturgeon's drive for independence; in Northern Ireland, they are the focus of no end of anxiety.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.